 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
About the Author
Dan Greenberg is a longtime observer of science policy and politics. He is the author of "Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism" (University of Chicago Press), as well as other books, and has published widely in newspapers and popular and professional magazines.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Michael Nelson, guest blogger
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
McCain and Obama Differ Little on Science Policy | Comment [5]
A Name on a Mailing List Is Forever | Comment
Stodgy NIH Announces New Program for Risky, Far-Out Reseach | Comment [2]
Obama Outlines Changes for Science Policy | Comment [4]
Where $1-Million Is Modest Pay | Comment [26]
Featured Articles By the Author
We've Got a Monster on the Loose: It's Called the Internet
From his decades in the news business, H.L. Mencken observed that “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”
Alas, or maybe fortunately, for him, he did not live to experience the Internet — which, far more than any newspaper, must be having profound if immeasurable effects on the hundreds of millions, or more likely billions, who ingest its limitless offerings. As Internet usage rapidly climbs, newspaper reading continues to decline, to the point where survival of conventional news in print is becoming doubtful.
Meanwhile, from an infinity of online sources, heads are being filled with data, information, and images, from all manner of sources — responsible, sensible, loony, exploitative, and malevolent. Fencing off children from much of this stuff has become a major parental concern, as well as a hopeless task, given children’s zest for the forbidden and preternatural facility at the keyboard.
Cervantes explains that Don Quixote became delusional because of excessive readings about chivalry. Declaring himself a knight errant, the Don rode off to rescue damsels in distress, confront giants, and fight windmills. No disrespect for the potency of the written word, but online games and pornography, especially in combination, easily exceed print for unhinging the mind. Pornography is reportedly the biggest seller on the Internet, and, if news accounts are to be believed, for Humbert Humbert emulators, it is the communications system of choice.
Has there been an uptick in bizarre and pathological behavior since the Internet became a common household implement over, say, the past 10 years? There’s no way of untangling the Internet from the many other elements of society. But one might speculate about the soaring consumption of antidepressants, a reported increase in suicides among middle-aged men, and several spectacular mass murders at universities. Violent online games, pornography, and detachment and isolation from human contact come easily to the Internet user. Is there a connection? No one can say for sure, but the possibility can’t be dismissed.
Like all technologies, the Internet is employable for good and bad, and where it is applicable to benign purposes, it can be uniquely useful. But it is easily adaptable to mischief and worse. By many accounts, it has spawned an epidemic of plagiarism among college students — and an ensuing cat-and-mouse game with professors sifting their prose online. Identity theft is another gift to online malefactors. And sheer confusion — deliberate or inadvertent — on important public matters easily flourishes on the Internet.
Under the headline “Struggling to Squelch an Internet Rumor,” The New York Times on February 27 reported a furor at the University of Kentucky concerning allegations that a course on the Holocaust had been cancelled in response to protests from Muslims. “Over the past year,” the Times stated, “faculty members and administrators … have collectively received thousands of e-mail messages … repeating the same baseless accusation — that pressure from Muslims had led the university to drop its Holocaust course.”
From whence the rumor? From an e-mailed report of a Holocaust controversy at a school in Britain — where e-mail addresses end in “.uk,” also the initials of the University of Kentucky.
No point in fretting about the Internet. It’s here to stay, bound to grow, and immune to virtually all restraints.
But don’t anyone doubt it: While it’s a blessing in many important respects, it’s also a monster.
Posted at 02:53:27 PM on February 27, 2008 | All postings by Dan GreenbergComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: The Ivies' Curious Surge to Aid Needy Students
Next: Delusions on the Frontiers of Science
The internet is a wonderful tool for those of us who learned before its existence to be critical thinkers, not to believe everything we read, and to seek multiple independent sources of information. The internet is also a showcase for narrow-minded uncritical bigotry, stereotyping, overgeneralization, and prejudice. There is no end to the examples that can be cited. A few compulsive zealots can spew forth more hatefulness than the rest of us can or will respond to with reasoned commentary or factual rebuttals. This creates a new urgency for improvement and expansion of efforts in academia to encoursge critical thinking. I’m concerned that some colleges and universities are so committed to indoctrination that they might find promotion of critical thinking against their interests. But what other defense is there in an open society?
— Joe Erwin · Feb 27, 03:52 PM · #
“pity this busy monster, manunkind, not.” etc.
“A world of made is not a world of born—
pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones,
but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence.”
Hmmm. e.e. cummings, the prophet….
— Joe Erwin · Feb 27, 04:04 PM · #
The school shootings are being caused by the SSRI antidepressants.
Go to: www.SSRIstories.com for a list of over 2,100 tragedies that involve the SSRIs. The full media article is available for each case.
— Darlene · Feb 27, 04:18 PM · #
Darlene, yours is a serious charge that should not be made nor taken lightly. But, I tend to think your point is worth examining and evaluating carefully. It is my impression that the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) are being way overprescribed— including for non-FDA-approved “off-label” uses (especially for depression in adolescents and pre-adolescents). And, of course, the association is usually an offset effect, rather than an onset effect. Several of these shooters have recently gone OFF the medication—which tends to drop them off into a dark abyss of violent and destructive depression. Obessive thoughts can be fostered by internet input and the possibility of ordering serious weapons over the internet. And an approved application of SSRIs for children and adolescents is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors). Again, the withdrawal from SSRIs would be expected to release inclinations toward OCD.
— Joe Erwin · Feb 27, 05:43 PM · #
Joe,
The withdrawal syndrome from SSRIs can produce a state of OCD or mania, for that matter, which was worse than the original OCD for which the patient received the SSRI in the first place. This mechanism is known as “supersensitivity psychosis’ and is caused by the brain’s ability to adjust to the blockage of serotonin receptors caused by the SSRI by growing more serotonin receptors. Thus, when the person discontinues the drug, the additional serotonin receptors cause an ‘overwhelm’ to the brain once they are ‘unblocked’.
This is why withdrawal must never be done abruptly.
— Darlene · Feb 27, 11:33 PM · #
Darlene, that is an interesting concept regarding the mechanism. I’ll be meeting with some colleagues in mid-March who have greater expertise than I do on neurochemistry and psychopathology, including some very current work on serotonin receptors. I’ll do a little more homework on this before I meet with them, so I can ask more refined questions. I am currently consulting in a situation where I deal with people (especially children) who are often put on SSRIs. It seems to me that a great hazard, over which no one but the medicated individual has control, is whether that person reliably takes the medication. Quitting abruptly can occur anytime, and this could have especially profound consequences after a lengthy course of treatment. I’ll check further into the mechanism you describe. I wish there were a way for us to exchange contact information so we could discuss this further.
— Joe Erwin · Feb 28, 03:48 AM · #
Joe, Go to: http://www.cjcp.ca/pdf/CJCP_04-032_e69.pdf
This partially explains what is happening during withdrawal and includes info on supersensitivity psychosis.
Actually, the term ‘supersensitivity psychosis” is more well known in discontinuation of antipsychotics and the “rebound” of dopamine but the same can hold true for serotonin.
— Darlene · Feb 28, 07:45 AM · #
FYI, the entire “Holocaust controversy at a school in Britain” is a fake. Have a look at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7226778.stm for details
— James · Feb 28, 08:33 AM · #
I think you have it backwards. Instead of asking what effect the Internet has on people, we should be asking why so many people crave the violent games, pornography, and detachment and isolation from human contact provided by the Internet. If nobody wanted that stuff it would go away.
— ed238 · Feb 28, 10:47 AM · #
Ed: Point taken, but the market has a powerful hand in creating demand, not just meeting demand. The powerful market narrative in the U.S. would lead us to believe that the makers of pornography, violent video games, etc. are catering to demand only; a more nuanced look at the dynamics would likely show that those making money in these endeavors have a great deal of power in creating the demand as well. Not that I can offer a solution; the idea of censoring or regulating these materials gives me pause to shudder.
— AnthonyS · Feb 28, 11:22 AM · #
To borrow the line from Casablanca, the internet is like the real world, only more so.
The analogy isn’t really all that bad. Just as Louis had managed to turn himself into an Ur-Playboy in Casablance years before the magazine was founded, with a superficial, cynical (in the pejorative sense), selfish Weltanscauung, so the internet is a shallow, short-term, less-than-skin-deep version of what some of us are still naive enough to call the real world.
The bad news is that we can’t do a thing about it. It can’t be legislated, controlled, purified, strained, filtered, or tamed. That it has in common with the real world.
The good news is that we don’t have to like it. We don’t have to log on every damn minute of the day, seven days a week. In fact, it’s remarkably easy to give it a miss.
One interesting exercise: since our first computer (an IBM PC from when that was all you had to say, because there was only one kind) we’ve had more than I can remember. The newest one, however, after being logged on so I could get the thugs in Redmond to switch on Office, is now offline and will stay that way. Computer, yes. Word processing, yes, and other programs, yes. The internet can’t hurt this computer or cause me related frustration if I don’t go online.
Too many people are complaining, in effect, that they took a stroll in the nude through the worst part of town at midnight, and for some reason, things didn’t work out well. Grow up.
— Dan Kirklin · Feb 29, 07:26 AM · #
It would be just as easy to site the good as the bad, perhaps even point-for-point against Mr. Greenberg’s examples – for every plagiarist, how many scholars are there who are now able to make use of significant new (and academically rigorous) online research tools? Identity theft exists because anyone anywhere in the country with an internet connection now has an entire planet of shopping opportunities and the ability to buy items that would never be offered at their local corner store. And the web has been at least as powerful a tool for community organization and positive political inclusion as it has been for malicious political propaganda.
— Niel McDowell · Feb 29, 07:51 AM · #
Small point – it’s actually harder than ever to opt out of the Internet; more and more government functions (applying for benefits, signing up for programs, and the like) are done through the Internet. Public libraries are noticing this as they help more elders and people without much computer experience negotiate government applications.
That’s to say nothing of the way it’s necessary for library research, sharing course materials, and … doing this.
— BarbaraFister · Feb 29, 08:15 AM · #
Le monstre, c’est moi.
See Edge’s talk with Nicholas A. Christakis—fresher light on this topic.
— SL · Feb 29, 08:55 AM · #
What about the mass indoctrination of Christianity and Islam on the world? No one needs an Internet to spread myths and ensnare minds, not to mention incite them to commit unspeakable campaigns of mass murder. In fact, the Internet may actually prevent such mass hypnosis and mind control in the future by providing an intellectual cafeteria of contrariness.
— marci · Feb 29, 10:24 AM · #
Barbara Fister’s point is not small. More and more information, particularly governmental, is going online with no print counterpart. A great deal of information is “born digital” everyday, some very informative. The number of digitization projects is growing, including from places such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. Internet access can be tamed somewhat by use of certain search directories, knowing a few search strategies or tips, and other methods. It’s the best approach users have at this time.
— B.Anderson · Feb 29, 12:51 PM · #
Marci, dear —
I’m worried about you. I see your posts that seem to pop up everytime a story has a religious element, to warn us stupid-types about the evils of religion. This story really didn’t have a religous angle to set you off, so you went off on your own. You need to get a handle on this hate/anger thing. Cranky atheists are as unattractive as crabby Christians.
You can reply as nastily as you want; I don’t re-visit stories after commenting. I’ll move on, maybe you should, too.
— Jim · Feb 29, 01:04 PM · #