"Studying: the act of texting, watching TV or tweeting while there's an open book in front of you."
I read this line on Facebook while I was trying to do some research on John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding." I laughed out loud, shared it, tagged two friends, reloaded the page several times afterwards to check if they saw it, read an article shared on Facebook about Occupy Harvard, commented on said article, read some other articles, found something really interesting, tweeted it and reloaded my Facebook again to see if my friends had commented. By then, I had spent too long on the computer, and it was time to turn it off.
And then I realized I had completely forgotten my research topic.
Every time I log on to a social website, I feel like an iPod plugged into a computer, syncing my mind with the Internet. All the information is updated, but sometimes my original ideas are forever lost during the process. Constantly confronted with the opinions of others, we are inevitably influenced by the crowd. But will all this information improve our beliefs? Or is it possible that we have been brainwashed by the crowd?
Social websites tend to replace our own independent ideas with popular ones shared by the crowd. They make everyone an up-to-date social being. But the more we outsource the formation of our beliefs to Facebook friends, the less we think for ourselves. We "share," "retweet," "like" or "favorite" other people's ideas rather than create our own. To agree is much easier than to think. The lure of conformity is hard to resist.
With more easily digestible and seemingly smart information at hand, who wants to spend time reading the babble of an old British guy who has terrible grammar even though he might be one of the best thinkers in the history of human civilization? One can easily glance over more than 10 New York Times articles in an hour and find inspiration. But if that hour is spent reading philosophy, one might be stuck on a single page. To take time and to think hard are the least tempting options.
Why are social networks so popular? There is definitely something more to it than the ability to "connect and share with the people in your life," as Facebook claims. Social networks make it easier than ever to know what others do and think. Being recognized by others and sharing opinions with friends makes us confident about ourselves — even if our ideas and beliefs are inherently wrong.
Facebook and Twitter not only limit our ability to judge, they also tend to eliminate the opportunity to ask "How?" and "Why?" We love Twitter because its information comes in short, sharp and easily digestible chunks. The 140-character limit successfully prevents some potentially pointless babble and forces people to impart something meaningful. But not everything can be said in 140 characters. Locke repeats many of his ideas over and over again in his "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding," making it difficult and sometimes boring to read. But his repetition does offer him the chance to form new and brilliant ideas along the way.
What's even more important is that, with only 140 characters, there is not enough room for anything more than short facts and opinions. There is no space for explanation, elaboration, proof or interpretation. The reaction to all questions is reduced to a simple yes or no, and the reaction to all facts becomes a judgment of right or wrong.
We live at a time when everything seems available. But the information explosion has led to a strange effect: People are now, more than ever before, reading the same thing. University of Chicago sociologist James Evans, who analyzed 34 million academic articles published in the last 50 years, found that the digitization of academic journals coincides with a concentration of citations. He suggests that scholars tend to focus on the most cited articles, which are ranked higher by search engines, and neglect more obscure research. Though it seems that everything is available within one click, scholars end up paying attention to the same things, citing what has already been cited.
We need to make sure the excess of communication does not end up silencing our own voices. If the time reserved for independent thinking is shredded by all the sharing, uploading, commenting and liking, how can we preserve the independence of the individual from collective wisdom that might be misguided?
Jan Cao '13 is a comparative literature concentrator from Nanjing, China. She can be reached at Jieran_cao@brown.edu.
