One issue with the future of the internet is the attempt to undermine net neutrality (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ilana-ross/excuse-me-what-do-you-mea_b_682333.html), however I think Professor Singer could be right about the future of the internet, because the internet is worldwide, and the net neutral parts of it could be be too powerful to be undermined. In a way the attempt to undermine net neutrality harkens to the past when operations like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL had captive audiences who only had access to their services. I'm hoping the worldwide internet will prove too much of a draw for the anti-neutrality interests to control, so that their subscribers (like the subscribers to Compuserve, etc in the past) will eventually demand full, neutral access.

Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net

No. The internet is making us stupid, and suppressing bonafide academics.

If we had the internet in the 1950s, we could not have wiped out smallpox or polio in the U.S. Today, enter the word "vaccine" and you will primarily get hits for anti-vaccine non-science. The health community is aware that when the bird flu hits, with a similar death toll to the influenza of 1918, it will take a high mortality before the surviving anti-vaccinators get vaccinated.

In K-12 education, the Univ. Conn. experiment with middle schoolers being unable to detect the falsehood of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus shows that there is no online "truth detector" protocol; if there was, we would all be using it.

Print libraries were good sources for students because they both classified (science in the 500-600s, occult in the 100s) and censored (yes, limited money meant they bought the peer-reviewed and expert materials first). There is no such filtering of the internet, and the valuable academic needle in the haystack of nonsense is hard to find.

Just as peer review in science serves to weed out the lesser-important research for researchers with limited time/resources, our culture formerly chose to interface our students with the best models of intellectual habit and materials respresenting the best scholarship of the time. That would be a "closed society."

Just how does opening the gates and flooding the next generation with non-scholarship improve life? To be more pointed, by what right do we press China to open the internet to anti-vaccination sites which will cause them to suffer future needless deaths in the 100s of thousands or more?

John Richard Schrock

#2 - No, the internet is not making us stupid. It's providing more access to the same print journals but without us having to leave the office. A bonafide academic should be able to tell the difference between a top tier journal and a junk journal regardless of where it's found.

I think that it's unduly optimistic to think that even a 'bona fide academic' will be able reliably to identify which science journals are publishing real, author-written, non-manipulated, fully peer-reviewed articles and which are not. At the limit, there may not be a big problem: people know which are the top journals in their field.

But even here, it would be naive to think that there are not significant problems. As reading editorials at JAMA, NYJM, LANCET and other top medical journals makes clear--and as following some of the darker events in other top journals reinforces (e.g., the disgraceful Manuel Chavela debacle at SCIENCE,which published a disclaimer about his research after having been unduly influenced by non-disinterested and corporate players with clear grudges and agendas)--there are major and serious problems with conflicts of interest, ghostwriting, and other forms of 'bending.'

As long as it is perceived to be advantageous to be able to claim that the 'science is on our side,' people with very strong interests in being able to institute--or more likely, block--regulation will continue to have powerful incentives to distort the facts, and thus to present non-disinterested, industry-sponsored, rigged studies as the truth.

The problem exists whether we have print journals or journals that only exist on-line, and it is a serious problem. But as anyone knows who has tried to get to the bottom of it, whether in their own research or in verifying the probity and originality of a student's work, the internet vastly increases the potential for 'science abuse' and cheating.

That doesn't nullify its value. Still less is it something that will have much (if any) effect on the direction of communication and reporting of research. But it IS something one should bear in mind. And it is CERTAINLY something that suggests that optimism about our ability to sort the wheat from the chaff is misplaced. There's a lot of chaff out there.....there will be a LOT more, and there will be a LOT more people whose principal exposures will be to junk, spin, and bent 'information.'

#3 - You're correct, but the journals appear on your office computer screen because your university, almost certainly via the library, pays the publisher or distributor for an account with the online service. We in academia sometimes forget that our experience of the Internet is markedly different from that available to most others. When we examine our disciplinary literatures online, we typically use the Internet only as a communication medium and the content we seek lies largely in commercially-produced, for-profit, restricted-access databases. This higher-quality, peer-reviewed, academically-sound information remains largely a province of the privileged. Some progress has been made in creating open-access online academic literatures, but in relative terms the open-access movement remains nascent. While academics should certainly appreciate the distinctions among information sources, we should not be surprised that our students and the wider public are largely unfamiliar with this particular manifestation of haves and have-nots.

#2 I do not think that the Internet is making us stupid, but I do think it demands more of us in understanding distinctions concerning the nature, quality, and purpose of information. When I address this with students, I draw an analogy to the concept of signal-to-noise ratio, in which I propose that one mission of our library is to drive down noise in the signal, so that their research is more efficient in terms of working with resources that their professors deem appropriate. Making distinctions among information resources is a skill and habit to be taught and learned. I find that students are typically smarter about this than they were several years ago, but they must still learn about the nature and uses of academic literatures.

#2:

This kind of gripe - about new media and how it's supposedly making us stupid - has been around forever. 2500 years ago, Plato said the exact same thing about the written word (a radical form of new media in its day and in its own right). Look how his prognostications panned out.

There's no stopping the internet, no going back to a pre-internet age, just like there's no going back to a pre-written-word age. Technologies like these weave themselves into the fabric of our lives and therefore become a part of us.

There's enough crappy print matter to fill up the Grand Canyon. It's all about being a discerning reader and evaulating sources, whatever form they take, print or electronic, then teaching students to do the same.

#3, the internet IS making us stupid. Of course, "bona fide" academics have at least a fighting chance of determining what is good science and what is not; their being misled is not the problem. The danger lies in the embrace of the dross by the ignorant, willfully and otherwise, who are easily persuaded by appeals to superstition and similar pseudo-scientific arguments.

#7:

"...the embrace of the dross by the ignorant?" Who talks like about people? The herd isn't as stupid as you think. That kind of language smacks of a corrosive elitism which, unfortunately, oftentimes characterizes the tone of academia.

I can't agree that the internet is making us stupid or that it's a panacea for ignorance, not that I think anyone is really making either argument.

Speaking only for myself, I don't need to be made stupid; I'm quite sufficiently stupid already without any help from the internet. On the other hand, the internet gives me instant access to a Grand Canyon of facts, information, data, insight, and . . . about that much bologna, misinformation, superstition, and falsehood, much of it for sale.

To borrow the line from Casablanca, the internet is like the real world, only more so. It's a brave new world, and it's dangerous as hell for the unwary. It's a bit like that quote, often attributed to Ruskin: "There is almost nothing in this world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the person who considers price alone is that man's lawful prey."

The price of information on the internet approximates zero per item. If we aren't careful, we get what we pay for. Convenience may offset a loss in reliability, accuracy, completeness, and so on. Or not.

No argument here, adjunct-admin. In 59 years I have yet to underestimate the herd.

If you are having trouble finding good resources, which are increasingly on the Internet (though not always the free one), then I suggest you have a conversation with your librarian.

Ultimately, it is silly to say the Internet is making us stupid. It is something like saying that the steam press made us dumb back in the early 19th century because there was an explosion of printed cheap and accessible matter, much of it similar to the fluff we find on the Internet. Clearly, that is not the case. The Internet is a medium, just like the codex so many academics know and love. It is not content. Plenty of stupid ideas have been upheld as facts in books and other print matter, just as there are plenty of good ones. The Internet as a medium for content delivery works essentially in the same way, if a lot faster.

When people make claims about the Internet making us stupid I think the best thing to assume is that they are speaking from a position of ignorance. It is a comment that lacks historical perspective, knowledge of existing tools that are used to peer review and determine the credibility of content, and knowledge of the critical thinking skills we should be passing on to students.

It seems to me that the issue being raised is access in developing countries and equality of access. To that end, I hope that there will be more support for OLPC (one-laptop-per-child) which has had, despite the cynical publicity, an immense impact. Only this week, I downloaded the new XO-software which had been developed in Paraguay and it is exceptional, with the facility to toggle between child (Sugar) and adult (Gnome) desktops by clicking an icon. The report is now that Negroponte and the OLPC team will collaborate with the Indian $35-tablet team. Needless to say, these developments are driven by Linux and OpenSource.

And blogs are making us read superficially.

The point was not that seasoned academics might not discern the tree octopus fraud, but that a whole new generation of young learners cannot. Research in journals such as Pediatrics on the mass of misinformation on childhood diarrhea (sometimes lethal) that even an academic out-of-field will accept, is solid, as are the data on antivaccination belief. The idea the internet can do no wrong appears to be teflon-coated and superficially accepted. It is leading to a dangerous "wisdom of the crowd" that will soon legitimitize creationism, the moon-landing-was-filmed-in-New-Mexico, etc. When I was a young student I gave up using "stupid" because I found the world gray instead of black-and-white. But discussions about the internet have given me reason to resurrect the term.

John Richard Schrock

I fully agree that Internet will change entire thinking process of developing world.We must provide them cheap and most reliable Internet services

"Over the next decade, closed cultures will find it increasingly difficult to keep their members from seeing and contacting people who live in more open societies."

Perhaps. But first, things will have to be like the story of Hansel and Gretel, updated, so that activists follow the kids and the witch into the forest and cover the forest floor with day-old bread to feed the birds. This is exactly what we're doing with mosques, which, except for the efforts of activists, would remain points of reference for our soldiers. We are, afterall, all of us (and not excluding Mr. Pinker himself), citizens of a nation that is at war.

One fewer option, with all options being the only quality that makes Steven Pinker different from anyone serving in the military, would make a difference. One fewer option for Steven Pinker. If we are all Hansel and Gretel and dependant upon the moon shining upon white bread crumbs and enabling us to find our ways home in the dark, Steven Pinker cannot be allowed to avoid childhood, being one of us. Avoiding childhood, I say, is the role of the witch.