Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

But I am sure you want to hear more about Helen Mirren. What’s she like? What does she eat for breakfast? Sadly, I was deluding myself with my own self-importance. When I looked at her profile it was clear that with only 216 followers, my Helen Mirren was most definitely a ‘troll’. Trolls are individuals who take delight in disrupting social networking sites by posting offensive comments or pretending to be someone else. I don’t even know if Helen Mirren is on Twitter but, if she is, I have no doubt she has thousands of followers. For one tantalizing moment that morning, my heart skipped a beat as I thought that my adolescent crush was taking an interest in me. That would have been an enormous boost to my ego but why would a great British actress like Helen bother with a lowly egghead like me? There again, even celebrity actresses are sometimes intrigued by the mundane lives of mere mortals. She is human, after all.

The Human Borg?

Some commentators have expressed anxiety over the rapid rise of social networks and have predicted a breakdown in human civilization. We have heard similar prophets of doom decrying all media from books to radio to television. One fear is that we are allowing the brains of our children to be destroyed forever as they lose the skills necessary to interact with others in real life and pass through a critical period of psychological development that is essential for healthy socialization. 19As the plasticity of their frontal neural circuits hardens, we are told that they will be forever locked out of normal social development and grow up into retarded adults. The claim is that they may never acquire adequate attention spans that are stimulated by real life social interaction. Social networking sites and online activity in general are depriving them of normal social environments. More alarming is the suggestion that the rise in childhood autism may be linked to increased online activity.

The scientific evidence for such claims is sparse to say the least and indeed the Internet is arguably beneficial for those who find normal social communication difficult. 20Also, critical periods are restricted to total deprivation at a very early age. Remember the Romanian orphans and the critical first six months? There are very few children using the Web before their first birthday! Also, as developmental neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop pointed out, the claim that online activity causes autism is ludicrous as the condition appears well before school age and the use of computers. 21When it comes to social development, the human brain is incredibly resilient and resourceful. So long as there is some social interaction then all should be fine. Just like language, humans are wired for social interaction but incredibly flexible in the actual way they do it. Yes, children may not learn the same Ps and Qs of social etiquette that their parents acquired during real interactions, but they will develop their own ways of interacting both on and offline. Consider one example of how children communicate using abbreviations in texting such as LOL (‘laugh out loud’), OMG (‘oh my God’), SNM (‘say no more’), BRB (‘be right back’), GTG (‘got to go’), or ROFL (‘roll on the floor laughing’). This is a highly effective strategy for transmitting phrases in an optimal way. This was not deliberately invented and handed down by the custodians of social networks but, like much of the etiquette on the Web, emerged in a bottom-up fashion. Left to their own devices, the kids will be all right.

In fact, there are arguments that rather than threatening the future of human psychological development, the new social media is returning us to the situation before the old media of print, radio and television infiltrated all of our lives. One of the gifted prophets of this new social revolution, June Cohen from the TED organization, makes this counterintuitive point. 22For much of human civilization, she argues, media was what happened between people in the exchange of news, stories, myths, jokes, education and art. We mostly communicated with one another around the Serengeti campfires. Up to a few hundred years ago, very few of us could actually read. Then the old media of books, radio and television appeared. If all of human history were compressed into a single twenty-four-hour day, these old media only emerged in the last two minutes before midnight. But this media was different from the village gossip we used to spend our time engaged in. Unlike normal communication, which flows in both directions, the media that entered our homes was one directional. We read the news, listened to the radio and watched the television. We stopped communicating with each other. As Cohen puts it, ‘TV created a global audience, but destroyed the village in the process.’

Then Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, providing a different kind of social experience. This new media, which by the same analogy just appeared seconds ago on the clock of human history, is much more democratized, decentralized and interactive. Cohen believes that we are returning to a point in human development where we really can communicate with each other again, only this time we are not restricted to the physical size and location of our village.

This may be true but there are some cautionary tales that we must bear in mind. We are interacting once again but the Web is very different to the campfire or garden fence. We are unlikely to become socially retarded but the way we construct our sense of self will be affected. The process won’t stop, only the way we go about it. This is because the Web is changing the way we live our lives. It is not just the amount and range of readily accessible information or the way we do business or find entertainment. It is the very way we behave toward one another. After all, interaction with one another through a computer is not natural. Then again, neither are telephone conversations and the telephone hardly reshaped our social development. The real difference is the power of each of us to communicate simultaneously with the group as a whole. That’s a first.

Never in the history of humankind have we had the ability to communicate rich information with practically anyone on the planet instantaneously. Each new innovation from the printing press to the telephone and eventually the computer has been regarded as a milestone in human technological advancement, but the invention of the Web will outstrip them all in terms of its impact on the human race. Now we can potentially communicate with anyone. We can harness the collective power of multiples brains. Many of us are amazed by what computers and software can do. For example, there is more technology and power in today’s programmable microwave oven than was needed to put a man on the moon. Moore’s Law tells us that computer power doubles approximately every two years, which is one of the reasons I always seem to delay replacing computers in anticipation of the more powerful model just around the corner. Eventually we will reach a technical limit to Moore’s Law and require a new type of computing. But the Web is different. The Web will not be so limited. This is because the Web is primarily a medium for sharing knowledge and ideas generated by brains.

Every normal human brain is more powerful than any computer so far built. By connecting them together through the Web, we have the potential to harness the collective thinking of millions of individual brains that are constantly checking and rechecking material on the Web. In 2005, the premier science journal Nature declared that the online encyclopaedia ‘Wikipedia’, created entirely of voluntary contributions from Web users, was as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica , the multi-volume traditional source of knowledge produced by teams of paid experts, first published at the end of the eighteenth century. Web users were simply motivated to distribute their knowledge free of charge and, to this day, Wikipedia is funded almost entirely from public donation.