Is the Internet Making People Dumber? (Short Answer: Yes)

Many have for a long time expressed concern that the Internet has had a negative effect on its users' habits and mental capacities, with obvious issues the capacity to concentrate on anything at length, and cope with text, particularly of more complex kinds, for various reasons (that screen-based devices work less well than paper books at rewarding attention, that the Internet encourages the skim over the close-read, etc.).

All this seems to me very plausible--and it also seems plausible to me that, rather than as I had hoped, technology progressing so that the disadvantages of screen-based devices were reduced, the opposite has happened, because of how the Internet has changed. It has become more oriented toward shorter items over long (as with the way "microblogging" through Twitter replaced real blogging), and less text-based and more audiovisual (as with how all blogging has been replaced by vlogging), with all that implies for users' habituation to doing anything but reading with attention for long (even the "six paragraph blogpost" that the "genius" Sam Bankman-Fried demanded everything be reduced to likely getting beyond many of them).

And as if that were not enough, there is the way in which any prolonged, deeper, usage has come to entail ceaseless interruption, ceaseless diversion, ceaseless breaks in any train of thought by endless popups extorting from them "agreement" to allow cookies, disable ad blockers, login, pay up, etc. for the privilege of looking at what they were likely pushed to look at thanks to search engine optimization, "sponsored" results and the rest, in spite of the fact that the search results are ever more likely to be pure garbage. (Never mind the kind of research I do for books such as these; simply following the news has become far more of a grind than it was before.)

The endless assault on the Internet user's thought process, with all its intellectual and even psychological effects, seems all too likely to corrode the ability of an Internet user to think at all should they subject themselves to very much of it.

But one should not expect to see the (apropos of a more fitting but far more offensive term) courtiers of Big Tech who write the news--the kind of people who said Sam Bankman-Fried was a genius--to admit it. Instead they dutifully defend everything that has been done, and will be done (they are always sure paywalls work, always sure the problems must be the work of something other than the vicious exploitation of the web user, etc.), while sanctimoniously attacking everyone who thinks that the Internet ought to actually be useful as simply scum who want "free stuff."