Caught in the Web? Internet can blunt your creative edge

This year marks an important landmark in the history of the Internet, a vital infrastructure of the knowledge economy. It turns 40 this year.

We are living in a knowledge economy. This means that the price of any product or service depends not so much on its material or physical content but on the technology behind it. Technology is congealed knowledge which is in the minds of the people. Hence, there is a rediscovery of the centrality of humans as the most important asset of any enterprise.

A harsh reality of the knowledge economy is the intense competition in the market. Thanks to globalisation, innovation has become the key to success. It helps to create new wealth by way of intellectual property rights.

The Internet is the heart of today���s knowledge economy. It is the soul of the information technology-driven world.
But does the Internet help in creating new knowledge and new intellectual property vital for the long-term sustainability of the knowledge economy?

True, the Internet has made the life of researchers and scientists easy. But making life easy may not be beneficial all the time. Take the example of calculators. The older generation had to memorise the tables of multiplication. But today���s kids are exposed to a wide range of gadgets like calculators, computers and what not. Naturally, they may not develop the mental skills the older generation possessed in arithmetic.

Perhaps that may not be a major example of the downside of technology making life easy.

In fact, a greater danger of the effects of Internet is that it may blunt skills vitally needed for innovation and research. Take the case of a research for a doctoral degree (PhD). Before the age of the Internet, a research student had to spend days and months searching for relevant literature. Nowadays, a quick search on the Internet makes a whole treasure house of references readily available.

This may lead to mental laziness in some cases. If the authorities and the guides are not alert, plagiarism will go undetected. Take the case of the 17-yearold NRI student at Harvard who won a prize in English Literature sometime ago. She had to shamefacedly accept her plagiarism once it was exposed.

More serious is another danger which was reported in The Economist a few months ago. After all, the search on the Internet depends on links. These links are provided by key words. In a way, the link words themselves may limit the connection and references and prejudice the research.

Many a time real breakthroughs have come from lateral thinking or out-of-thebox thinking. This means that the researcher may sometimes have to relate ideas from a totally different field to the problem on hand to arrive at an innovative solution. Edward de Bono compared this to the process of digging for water at a nearby place instead of digging deeper and deeper at the same place.

It is like exploring lanes and bylanes during travel without sticking to the well-trodden path. Most of the links on the Internet operate on the basis of logical known associations and do not provide the scope for lateral or out-of-the-box thinking.

In other words, the very connectedness of the Internet may act as a block on such thinking. Out-of-the-box thinking is triggered by subconscious perception of the parallels between the subject of study and an apparently different subject. Therefore, can Internet help in creating new intellectual property?

There is, however, one aspect in which Internet has helped in Intellectual Property Rights creation. The enormous delays that used to take place in the scanning of the existing literature can now be overcome, thanks to the access provided by the Internet. The delays in peer review and publication in print can also be drastically reduced.

There is always an upside and a downside for every technology. The Internet is no exception. Being aware of the downside can help make better use of the Internet to innovate and create new knowledge.