Thinking and the Internet

I remember reading this argument from Daniel Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School, as to whether or not memorizing anything is relevant to critical thinking in today’s world:

“I defined thinking as combining information in new ways. The information can come from long-term memory – facts you’ve memorized – or from the environment…Critical thinking processes are tied to the background knowledge.”

In other words, facts in memory are the starting point for your analysis; and hence memorizing is important even if everything is just a Google search away. I had agreed with Willingham when I read his argument.

But now, after reading Clive Thompson’s take on the subject in his book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, I think there is a way to go with Willingham’s approach, but in a smarter way. After all, as Thompson says, we now “outsource our memory” to be held on the Internet and rely on Google to find what we want when we want it:

“Does it make us smarter when we can dip in so instantly?”

Thompson asks the interesting question as to why many treat dipping into the Internet as being different from dipping into books? Would the predecessors of such people have been anti-written word and anti-printing press, he wonders?

Thompson is in the camp that believes that we are only as smart as the number of dots we can connect. And since the outsourcing of memory has resulted in the number of dots going through the roof, all of us have more dots available to connect. Which would, logically speaking, make us smarter.

If you agree with the above, then it’s just logical that we don’t need to remember every small detail. Instead, we need to remember the keywords that will open the Google cave of riches! Meta-memory is what really matters.

So is that all there is to it? Should we focus on remembering just the meta-data and continue to outsource our memory? Thompson points out the risk with that approach: since we rely on search algorithms (Google or something else tomorrow) to retrieve information, we are subject to their biases, deliberate or unintentional.

That said, I still feel the overall effect of the Net is to make us smarter.