As a great starting point I found the following article - The Internet: Is it changing the way we think? . A number of different people add their views to whether they think the internet changes the way we think. I especially liked the comment by psychiatrist Ed Bullmore:
“One possibility is that the brain and the internet have evolved to satisfy the same general fitness criteria. They may both have been selected for high efficiency of information transfer, economical wiring cost, rapid adaptivity or evolvability of function and robustness to physical damage.Networks that grow or evolve to satisfy some or all of these conditions tend to end up looking the same.”
I like this idea that the internet is like an extension of our brains. Does this mean that out unconcious behaviours have helped to fashion it?
Scott Thompson argues that as technology and mobile devices improve we have “seen the technology become 'domesticated', to the extent that we now allow it onto the sofa in our living rooms- or even reading on smartphones and iPads in our bedrooms” (Scott Thompson, Head of Digital Research at Starcom) We are permanently connected. I read this while sat on the sofa and laughed. I think this is what most people think of when they think about technology changing our behaviours. It’s so pervasive of our everyday lives, but is this a change or an adaptation? We use the Internet to keep in touch, whereas previously we would have used the phone, or popped round for a cup of tea. I know there are arguments out there that as technology gets more social we actually become less social.
So, does making the Internet more accessible and easy to use, really change our behaviours?
Wikipedia states that behaviour is:
“..the actions of a system or organism, usually in relation to its environment, which includes the other systems or organisms around as well as the physical environment. It is the response of the system or organism to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary.”
Does that mean that the Internet is therefore just a new stimulus? Have my behaviours changed? If anything the Internet has helped me to do things more quickly. When I was at school, I would research in much the same way as I do now. Reading around the subject, exploring the different opinions and ideas. This is what I do now with the Internet. However, I have noticed that technology can change my behaviour. Email is the success and the devil of our working lives. It’s become so easy to log on and check that I do find that I have to be quite firm with myself to not be tempted while I am off of work. This is a change in behaviour seen across the world of work. And I think not a healthy one. But then, prior to email I am sure there were people who spent too long at the office. Now, we think because we are doing it at home, that it doesn’t have any impact on our personal lives – after all we are home with our families. But does that mean that families’ experiences of us are depleted?
I found an interesting question raised about when our behaviours change, touched on in a blog by Antti Social. He comments that we may have changed the content of what we communicate through social media, because more people have access and it is becoming an integral part of work as well as pleasure, therefore we have to regulate what we say in case it gets us in trouble. Does this mirror the way we change our behaviours in a normal face-to-face environment? Does this change necessitate that we are therefore no longer being open?
I think that some of these questions may be expanded upon next week.
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