Michael P. Lynch - The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data

The

of Us

Over the years, Ive been fortunate to talk about these subjects with many wise and intelligent people, including Robert Barnard, Don Baxter, Paul Bloomfield, Sandy Goldberg, Patrick Greenough, Hanna Gunn, Julian Jackson, Casey Rebecca Johnson, Brendan Kane, Junyeol Kim, Nathan Kellen, Tom Lynch, Helen Nissenbaum, Nikolaj Jang Lee Pedersen, Duncan Pritchard, Baron Reed, David Ripley, Paul Roberts, Marcus Rossberg, Evan Selinger, Nate Sheff, Tom Scheinfeldt and Daniel Silvermint. A special shout-out to the Block Island Cognitive Research Institute, who heard early versions of these ideas (over and over again): Paul Allopenna, Terry Berthelot, James Dixon, Inge-Marie Eigsti, Lisa Holle, Jim Magnuson and Emily Myers.

Nate Sheff and David Pruitt were of great help in researching various materials in the initial stages of this project. Early drafts of the manuscript benefited heavily from comments by Patricia Lynch, Phil Marino, Kent Stephens, Tom Stone and Steven Todd; Terry Berthelot provided invaluable commentary on a later draft. Portions of this book were given as talks at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, the University of Edinburgh, the University of St. Andrews, Northwestern Universitys Kaplan Humanities Institute, University of Cincinnatis Taft Center, Syracuse University, Ohio State University, the American Philosophical Association, Yonsei University, TEDx, the Chautauqua Institution and SXSW. Portions of chapters 4 and 6 build on ideas I first tried to express in A Vote for Reason, Privacy and the Concept of the Self and Privacy and the Pool of Information in the New York Times The Stone blog, as well as The Philosophy of Privacy: Why Surveillance Reduces Us to Objects, May 7, 2015, in The Guardian. The ideas of chapter 1 draw inspiration from NeuroMedia, Knowledge and Understanding, published in Philosophical Issues: A Supplement to NOS, vol. 24 (2014).

Finally, I owe special thanks to my agent Peter Matson and my editor Phil Marino, who both believed; editor Allegra Huston, who clarified; my sisters Patty, Bridget and Rene, who taught; and to Terry and Kathleen, who not only understand, but help me do the same.

The changes wrought by the Internet are sometimes compared to those brought about by the printing press. In both cases, technological advances led to new ways of distributing information. Knowledge became more widely and cheaply available, which in turn led to mass education, new economies and even social revolution.

But in truth, the comparison with the printing press underplays the significance of the changes being brought about by the Internet today. The better comparison is with the written word.

Writing is a technology, a tool. Yet its invention wasnt just a change in how information and knowledge was distributed. It was a new way of knowing itself. Writing allows us to communicate across timeboth with ourselves and with others. It allows us to outsource memory tasks and therefore lessen our cognitive load.

Not long ago, for example, I discovered a note my father had written, taped to the back of an old chainsaw I had inherited from him. It was more than a note, really; it was a little essay, detailing good and bad practice with the saw. My dads house was peppered with such memos. He would write them as a reminder of how best to go about various tasks that one might do only irregularlyreplacing the fuel filter on the lawn mower, shutting down the water heater. He would then tape them in a spot where he would be sure to later run across them. When I was a teenager, I found it embarrassing, but I get it now. He was a busy man and knew that he might forget a trick or lesson hed learned while doing something for the first time. He was, in short, communicating with his future self, while simultaneously relieving his present self of the burden of remembering. That, in microcosm, is what writing allows us to do, and also why its invention is one of the most important developments in human history. It allows us to time-travel and share the thoughts of those who have come before.

The Internet is bringing about a similar revolution in our ways of knowing. Where the written word allows us to time-travel, the Internet allows us to teleportor at least to communicate in an immediate way across spatial gulfs. Changes in information technology are making space increasingly irrelevant. Our libraries are no longer bounded by physical walls, and our ways of processing and accessing what is in those libraries dont require physical interaction. As a result, we no longer have to travel anywhere to find the information we need. Today, the fastest and easiest way of knowing is Google-knowing, which means not just knowledge by search engine but the way we are increasingly dependent on knowing via digital means. That can be a good thing; but it can also weaken and undermine other ways of knowing, ways that require more creative, holistic grasps of how information connects together.

New technology has always spurred a similar debateand it should. During the heyday of postwar technological expansion in the 1950s, philosophers and artists worried about what that nuclear weapon technology was doing to us, and whether our ethical thinking was keeping up with it. Bertrand Russell, writing in the Saturday Evening Post, argued that we need more than expanded access to knowledge; we need wisdom, which he took as a combination of knowledge, will and feeling. Russells point was simple: growth in knowledge without a corresponding growth in wisdom is dangerous. This book is motivated by a similar worry and with a desire to do something about it. Yet where Russell was concerned with a specific kind of knowledge knowledge of nuclear bombsmy concern is with the expansion of knowledge itself, with how the rapid changes in technology are affecting how we know and the responsibilities we have toward that knowledge.

Still, this is not an anti-technology book. Im a dedicated user of social media and the platforms that enable it (the rise of which is sometimes called Web 2.0). I tweet, I Facebook, I have a smartphone, a tablet, and more computers than I care to admit. I am in no position to write an anti-technology book. Technology itself is not the problem. Unlike nuclear weapons or guns, information technology itself is generally not designed to kill people (although it can certainly lend a hand). Information technologies are more like cars: so fast, sleek and super-useful that we can overrely on them, overvalue them and forget that their use has serious consequences. The problems, such as they are, are due to how we are using such technologies.

My aim is to examine the philosophical foundations of what Ill call our digital form of life. And whether or not my conclusions are correct, it is clear that this is a task we must engage in if we want to avoid the fate that worried Russell: being swallowed up by our technology.