The Perks (And Drawbacks) of Being Connected

In -- focused on the new importance of concerts in today's music landscape-- I spent a paragraph lamenting the music industry's decline since having gone online. In full cranky-grandpa-mode, the flowery happiness of old record stores was contrasted with the allegedly bleak isolation that is today's reality: sitting alone in one's room, illegally pirating track by track off some shady corner of the Internet.

Back in my day, we used to pay good money for our records. At least these young whippersnappers are only stealing whatever rap-crap the radio stations play. 

All jokes aside, my point is that I never meant to sound like a grump. Though I’d guess most record label execs wish Al Gore had never invented the Internet, I’ll be the first to admit that we live in a truly amazing time.  Each year promises entirely new creations, with devices half as thick and twice as powerful.

We've migrated online, into the new blank pages of the virtual world offered up to us, more completely than could ever have been imagined. We move at the speed of Moore’s Law, always adapting to new ideas and structures, always accepting of replacements and eager to learn, always writing, sharing, making. More connected than ever, our only limit to creation and movement is the number of hours in a day. (In addition, Patch is an entirely online operation, so I’m under corporate pressure to argue in the Internet’s favor.)

I’ll never complain about cellphones or Twitter or any of it, because it’s unhelpful to dismiss such things solely for the superfluous ways in which they can be used. Rather, the question lies in how technology can supplement our lives versus how technology can act as a crutch.

Cases for both sides of the argument lie in an New York Times article I stumbled upon, which documents the findings of a joint study between researchers at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “…Participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, ‘an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased. The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later.”

The Internet has re-prioritized the inner workings of our memories, arranging information according to exactly how important it is to know. The ostrich eye/brain bit of trivia is, after all, just a click away.

Like it or not, we cannot live comfortably without what we've become used to. If the plugs were pulled, how much would we suffer at the loss of our external memories? When the power goes out, we panic. When our phones die, we feel disconnected. And when the iPad 3 comes and we're stuck with the suddenly-obsolete iPad 2s, we'll become inferior for our older, slower machines.

But the researchers noticed the not-so-surprising result of another experiment, which “…was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember...Participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder. 'That kind of blew my mind,'" Dr. Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia leading the research, said in an interview. “Human memory… is adapting to new communications technology.”

When we come across new apps, new opinions, and new ideas, our brains have actually become more acclimated to processing and storing that information. The concept is incredible, and a bit scary. The skills and traits that were once important for people to retain have fallen by the wayside in the face of what our computers, phones, or tablets allow us to do. No longer important are the blips of information broadcast  on TV or gleaned off the front page, because with a few keystrokes and the click of a button we can retrieve almost anything.

Yet our complete interconnectedness calls for a completely new skill set- having many different conversations simultaneously, for example, and being able to engage in all those conversations with meaningful details. We have so much more content delivered to us on a daily basis, and we must keep up with dozens of new sectors of culture; Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and instantly-available media leaves no shortage of things to do. 

Everyone has seen at least one teenager texting a speed previously thought impossible, scoffing, "What could he possibly be texting about? There's no way it's anything important." While it might be easy to dismiss a new generation of technology and the people who use it, a different perspective might be to marvel at how the culture has shifted, and how different our priorities (and our brian's priorities) have become.

Today, online moves the world, for better or for worse.