The Internet is taking a beating these days. Nicholas Carr believes, and in his recent book, The Shallows, cites plenty of research to buoy his assertion that, the Internet is reconfiguring our brains, making us worse thinkers. Yes, the Web puts vast amounts of information at your fingertips, but its functionality has made it possible to do what scholars and scientists and just about everyone who’s ever studied anything have always wanted to do: cross-reference everything. So we flit about, moving from one article to another as quickly as we can click on hyperlinks—the mere presence of which greatly reduces reading comprehension. Carr argues that our brains are actually being rewired as a result. (The blog Three Percent has been taking up these ideas recently in a series of posts derived from the first Future of Reading conference, where participants seemed split between “claiming that reading is just migrating to a new place and form, to claiming that technology can help improve close reading, to a belief that the belief in a constant decline in readership has been around since Gutenberg Day One and nothing has really changed.”)
In a recent New York Times op-ed, David Brooks wrote, “The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian.” This is a long-standing claim, and is on one level true: Internet access offers (near) universal freedom to create and disseminate information, and to consume it on the other end. But on another level, this assertion is complete bullshit: We all know that the Internet has its own hierarchy, that the virtual equivalent of the crazy homeless man ranting about UFOs shouldn’t be—and, generally, is not—taken seriously.
Consider design. Books, for several hundred years, have not changed much at all. The paper is nicer. The covers last longer. And the evolution of printing technology has allowed for prettier pictures. But the format has remained static since the letterpress days: One reads from left to right, top to bottom, turning the pages to make progress. The Internet, on the other hand, is almost infinitely malleable—but you need a good blacksmith. Which has led to a hierarchy: the nicer, the more professional looking a site is, the more respected it is. Which sort of negates the egalitarianism.
But where do these two notions intersect? If there is a hierarchy, and if we now know why and how our brains are being rewired, can’t the blacksmiths behind the curtain counteract this effect? There is no single answer, of course, and much trial and error (along with a fair amount of hand wringing) will occur before designers—and information aggregators—find workable solutions. Despite Brooks’ pat assessment of Internet egalitarianism, there is an element of democratization at work, which allows individual concerns—preventing the dumbing down of the populace, for instance—to be articulated and amplified to the point where they might effect change (in this case, to the structure and function of the medium). On the Internet, there is no Tyranny of the Majority.