Wisdom beyond bits and bytes

Are you reading this column online? Or are you on to the touchyfeely, salmon pink-paper avatar of ET? There’s no difference of content of course. But if you believe the latest screed penned against the World Wide Web by the technology-writer Nicholas Carr, the medium does seem to affect the message. “When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning,” he writes in The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. “Even as the internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

Is that really true? Is the internet rewiring our brains into shallower versions? They said something similar when electricity and telegraph made their debut. But if you go by the socalled Flynn effect, IQ scores around the world have risen steadily since then. Similar gains have been reported for other cognitions such as semantic and episodic memories.

Of course, over a billion people on the planet still subsist on less than a dollar and a quarter a day. But what is equally striking is the manner in which growth has headed south, while debt has gone north. Meanwhile, Finland just became the first country to make broadband access a basic right — by 2015, every Finnish citizen can expect to acquire a 100 Mbps connection from the government.

They are obviously not listening to Carr’s cri de coeur against the internet as “a disruptive system , which seizes our attention only to scramble it!” The simplest fix in the interests of office productivity would be to impose ‘switchoff’ for those who procrastinate for hours on their social networks and compulsive checking of e-mail.

If that sounds too Big Brotherly, one can always use dedicated software to ‘insulate’ one’s attention. This offers the virtual equivalent of a forest retreat.

It also makes you wonder how they did things in an age where there were no scripts or texts. What happened, for instance , when Svetaketu came to sit by his father Uddalaka’s side? Svetaketu was proud of his learning. But he’s stumped when asked about the first cause of all causes. It’s an unfair question for the answer lies forever beyond words. But even Uddalaka’s take on what he calls Sat or the One without an equal is to be taken on faith, in humanity.