Frank Schirrmacher asks, does new technology change human cognition and behavior, and if so, how? This question is a true wake-up question, but its answer is far from obvious. The technophobe might conjecture that new technologies grow smarter while humans grow dumber, like my bank accountant yesterday, who could not calculate 20% of 500 euros without a pocket calculator. The technophile would respond that everything simply gets better, just as eyesight improves with glasses and friendship becomes easier with Facebook.

But there is a more interesting answer: the dynamic symbiosis of technology and mentality. A symbiosis is to the mutual benefit of two different species but requires mutual adaptation. Consider the invention that has changed human mental life more than anything else, writing and, subsequently, the printing press. Writing made analysis possible: One can compare texts, which is difficult in an oral tradition.

Writing also made exactitude possible, as in higher-order arithmetic; without a written form, these mental skills quickly reach their limits. But writing makes long-term memory less important than it once was, and schools have largely replaced the art of memorization with training in reading and writing. So it's neither loss nor gain, but both. And this means new adaptations between mentality and technology. In turn, new abilities create new tools that support new abilities, and so the spiral evolves.

The computer is another instance. The invention of the computer has been described as the third information revolution, after the advent of writing and the printing press. As early as the 1960s, electrical engineer Doug Engelbart had designed the first interactive computer tools, including the mouse, on-screen editing, screen windows, hypertext, and electronic mail. However, at this time, human-computer interaction still seemed science fiction; computers were for processing punched cards, not for interacting with humans. The impact computers had on society and science was difficult to imagine, and it went in both directions: computers and humans coevolve.

The first computer was a group of human beings: the large-scale division of labor, as evidenced in the English machine-tool factories and in the French government's manufacturing of logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the new decimal system in the 1790s.

Inspired by Adam Smith's praise of the division of labor, French engineer Prony organized the project in a hierarchy of tasks. At the top were a handful of first-rank mathematicians who devised the formulas; in the middle, seven or eight persons trained in analysis; and at the bottom, 70 or 80 unskilled persons who performed millions of additions and subtractions. Once it was shown that elaborate calculations could be carried out by an assemblage of unskilled workers rather than by a genius such as Gauss, each knowing very little about the larger computation, Charles Babbage was able to conceive of replacing these workers with machinery.

Babbage, an enthusiastic "factory tourist," explicitly referred to this division of mental labor as the inspiration for his mechanical computer, using terms from the textile industry, such as 'mill' and 'store' to describe its parts. Similarly, he borrowed the use of punched cards from the Jacquard loom, the programmable weaving machines that used removable cards to weave different patterns. Thus, initially there was a new social system of work, and the computer was created in its image.

Through dramatic improvements in hardware and speed, the computer became the basis for a fresh understanding of the human mind. Herbert Simon and Allan Newell proposed that human thought and problem solving were to be understood as a hierarchical organization of processes, with subroutines, stores, and intermediate goal states that decomposed a complex problem into simple tasks.

In fact, a social system rather than a computer performed the trial run for the Logic Theorist, their first computer program. Simon's wife, children, and graduate students were assembled in a room, and each of them became a subroutine of the program, handling and storing information. This was the same the Manhattan project, where calculations were done by an unskilled workforce of mostly women, at low pay.

Similarly, Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence, regarded the mind as a society of dumb agents, collectively creating true intelligence. Similarly, anthropologists have begun to use computer analogies to understand how social groups make decisions "in the wild," such as how the crew on a large ship solves the problem of navigation by storing, processing, and exchanging information. The direction of the analogy thus eventually became reversed: Originally, the computer was modeled on a new social system of work; now social systems of work are modeled on the computer.

We might think of mentality and technology as two sides of the same coin, as a system in which knowledge, skills, and values are distributed. This requires a new type of psychology that goes beyond the individual and studies the dynamics of human adaptation to the very tools humans create.

You're at a dinner in a restaurant, and various things come up in conversation — who starred in a movie, who was president when some event happened, what some religious denomination believes, what the exact wording is of a dimly remembered quotation. Just as likely as not, people around the table will pull out their iPhones, their Blackberries, their Androids, and search for the answer. The instant verification not only eases the frustration of the countless tip-of-the-tongue states that bog down a conversation, but offers a sobering lesson on how mistaken most of us are most of the time.

You'll be amazed at the number of things you remember that never happened, at the number of facts you were certain of that are plainly false. Everyday conversation, even among educated people, is largely grounded in urban legends and misremembered half-truths. It makes you wonder about the soundness of conventional wisdom and democratic decision-making — and whether the increasing availability of fact-checking on demand might improve them. 

I mention this because so many discussions of the effects of new information technologies take the status quo as self-evidently good and bemoan how intellectual standards are being corroded (the "google-makes-us-stoopid" mindset). They fall into the tradition of other technologically driven moral panics of the past two centuries, like the fears that the telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, the postcard, radio, and so on, would spell the end of civilized society.

Other commentaries are nonjudgmentally fatalistic, and assume that we're powerless to evaluate or steer the effects of those technologies — that the Internet has a mind and a will of its own that's supplanting the human counterparts. But you don't have to believe in "free will" in the sense of an immaterial soul to believe in "free will" in the sense of a goal-directed, intermittently unified, knowledge-sensitive decision-making system. Natural selection has wired that functionality into the human prefrontal cortex, and as long as the Internet is a decentralized network, any analogies to human intentionality are going to be superficial.

Frank Schirrrmacher's reflections thankfully avoid both extremes, and I would suggest another way to look at the effects of technology on our collective intelligence. Take the intellectual values that are timeless and indisputable: objectivity, truth, factual discovery, soundness of argument, insight, explanatory depth, openness to challenging ideas, scrutiny of received dogma, overturning of myth and superstition. Now ask, are new technologies enhancing or undermining those values? And as you answer, take care to judge the old and new eras objectively, rather than giving a free pass to whatever you got used to when you were in your 20s.

One way to attain this objectivity is to run the clock backwards and imagine that old technologies are new and vice-versa. Suppose someone announced: "Here is a development that will replace the way you've been doing things. From now on, you won't be able to use Wikipedia. Instead you'll use an invention called The Encyclopedia Britannica. You pay several thousand dollars for a shelf-groaning collection of hard copies whose articles are restricted to academic topics, commissioned by a small committee, written by a single author, searchable only by their titles, and never change until you throw the entire set and buy new ones." Would anyone argue that this scenario would make us collectively smarter?

If social critics started to scrutinize the immediate past and obsolescing present and not just the impending future, our understanding of the effects of technology on intellectual quality would be very different. The fact is that most of our longstanding, prestigious informational institutions are, despite their pretentions, systematically counter-intellectual. In the spirit of the technophobe screeds, let me describe them in blunt, indeed hyperbolic terms.

Many of the articles in printed encyclopedias stink — they are incomprehensible, incoherent, and instantly obsolete. The vaunted length of the news articles in our daily papers is generally plumped out by filler that is worse than useless: personal-interest anecdotes, commentary by ignoramuses, pointless interviews with bystanders ("My serial killer neighbor was always polite and quiet"). Precious real-estate in op-ed pages is franchised to a handful of pundits who repeatedly pound their agenda or indulge in innumerate riffing (such as interpreting a "trend" consisting of a single observation). The concept of "science" in many traditional literary-cultural-intellectual magazines (when they are not openly contemptuous of it) is personal reflections by belletristic doctors. And the policy that a serious book should be evaluated in a publication of record by a single reviewer (with idiosyncratic agendas, hobbyhorses, jealousies, tastes, and blind spots) would be risible if we hadn't grown up with it.

For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the Internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress. 

I tend to worry less about information overload at the personal, individual level and more about it at the societal and governmental level. The human brain is long used to being overloaded with sensory information, throwing most input away in the first half-second after sensing it; we are constantly bombarded by 'primes' or implicit suggestions as to what to think, feel, and do — yet we manage usually to stably do one thing at a time.  The brain is used to dealing with conflicting messages too, and managing and integrating the activity of so many physiological and nervous subsystems — but as the work of Ezequiel Morsella is showing, keeping all of that management out of conscious view so we never experience it.

We are already and have long been multitaskers, in other words, we just do it (so well) unconsciously, not consciously.  It is conscious multitasking (talking on the phone while driving) that we are so bad at because of the limits of conscious attention, but multitasking per se — we are built for that. As we gain skills those skills require less and less of that conscious attention so that an expert such as Michael Jordan, or today, Kobe or Lebron, can consciously plot his strategy for weaving through a maze of defenders down the court because his limited conscious attention is no longer needed for dribbling, body movements, head fakes, and so on.  Driving a car requires incredible multitasking at first but is soon much less difficult because the multitasking 'moves downstairs' and out of the main office, over time.

But Schirrmacher is quite right to worry about the consequences of a universally available digitized knowledge base, especially if it concerns predicting what people will do.  And most especially if artificial intelligence agents can begin to search and put together the burgeoning data base about what situation (or prime) X will cause a person to do. The discovery of the pervasiveness of situational priming influences for all of the higher mental processes in humans does say something fundamentally new about human nature (for example, how tightly tied and responsive is our functioning to our particular physical and social surroundings).  It removes consciousness or free will as the bottleneck that exclusively generates choices and behavioral impulses, replacing it with the physical and social world itself as the source of these impulses.

But the discovery that people are actually rather easy to influence and predict (once we know the triggering environmental cues or prompts) is fact is today being exploited as a research tool because we know now that we can activate and study complex human psychological systems with very easy priming manipulations.  A quarter century ago the methods to activate (to then study) aggressive or cooperative tendencies were more expensive and difficult, involving elaborate deceptions, confederates, and staged theatrics.  It is said that the early cognitive dissonance theorists such as Eliot Aronson used to routinely have their graduate students take theater classes.  And other social psychologists of that generation, such as Richard Nisbett, have publicly complained (in a good-natured way) about 'rinky-dink' priming manipulations that somehow produce such strong effects. (This reminds me of Kahneman and Tversky's representativeness heuristic; here the belief that complex human outputs must require complex causes.)

It is because priming studies are so relatively easy to perform that this method has opened up research on the prediction and control of human judgment and behavior, 'democratized' it, basically, because studies can be done much more quickly and efficiently, and done well even by relatively untrained undergraduate and graduate students.  This has indeed produced (and is still producing) an explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and social environment.  And so I do worry with Schirrmacher on this score, because we so rapidly building a database or atlas of unconscious influences and effects that could well be exploited by ever-faster computing devices, as the knowledge is accumulating at an exponential rate.

More frightening to me still is Schirrmacher's postulated intelligent artificial agents who can, as in the Google Books example, search and access this knowledge base so quickly, and then integrate it to be used in real-time applications to manipulate the target individual to think or feel or behave in ways that suit the agent's (or its owner's) agenda of purposes. (Of course this is already being done in a crude way through advertising, both commercial and political; we have just shown for example that television snack food ads increase automatic consumption behavior in the viewer by nearly 50%, in children and adults alike.)

In the beginning, numbers represented things. Digital encoding then gave numbers the power ofmeaning things. Finally, the order codes were unleashed, and numbers began doing things.

The cultural and intellectual transitions described by Schirrmacher and his commentators are higher-level manifestations of this. First we had digital representations of existing ideas. Then we had digital expressions of new, previously unrepresented ideas. And now we have network processes (including human collaboration) that might actually be ideas.

Is free will ours to lose?

Is human nature, or at least fundamental human behaviour, being changed by digital technology? I'd like to see some good empirical evidence before hazarding a conclusion — evidence identifying a growth in attention deficit disorders which links this to an exponential increase in computer use, studies citing escalating incidences of memory loss among the young, comparative brain scans of multi taskers and single taskers with their cerebral hemispheres lit up like Christmas trees. Perhaps we can safely attribute an increase in cases of carpal tunnel syndrome to widespread computer use, but while this might give a fashionable cachet to wrist splints among the young, it won't change human behaviour and is no cause for moral panic. The same wrist injury can be caused by playing the ukelele, or indeed any musical instrument, or by gripping your quill pen too tightly — writer's cramp — but we have never worried that the young are spending too much time practising their scales or writing sonnets.

The editor of the Wall Street Journal is reported to have accused Google of "encouraging promiscuity", which, if true, is a serious charge. His complaint, however, refers not to any advocacy of lax sexual behaviour but to Google News, whose daily aggregate of enticing headlines from around the world discourages old-style loyalty among readers. Once we plighted our troth for life, for better or worse, circulation rise or slump, to one newspaper delivered regularly to our door or bought at newsagents. Now, dazzled by the daily digital passeggiata, we've turned our backs on the stale pleasures of familiarity and spend heady hours communing with whichever passing news providers take our fancy. All for free. We barely pause to ask their names. Monetary issues apart, is this a bad thing? Or even new? Isn't it about choice? Survival of the slickest. I believe they call it the market. Once Rupert Murdoch has worked out a way of actually charging these fickle punters for his services, surely everyone will be happy and it will be business as usual.

So in the absence of hard evidence about the baleful effects of the Internet, one has to resort to anecdote and ill-informed personal observation. These are mine. Young people are on the whole nicer in the digital age. They are happier to spend time with, or at least tolerate the company of, adults than was my own generation of posturing post-soixante-huitards. The digital generation values friendship and understands reciprocity more than its earlier counterparts and is more emotionally insightful and expressive, qualities which I speculate may be enhanced by social networking and texting. These young people may not necessarily be more literate or informed but, unlike previous generations, they know exactly where to go when information is required.

Yes, the personal blogs and social network sites have unleashed an embarrassing pandemic of exhibitionism. But, and here is the liberating thing, we don't have to read it. Look away. And this compulsive urge to tell all in blush-makingly dull detail is no departure in terms of human behaviour. People have been writing painstaking accounts of their inconsequential lives since they first learned the alphabet and got hold of cheap stationery. For every Samuel Pepys, James Boswell or Virginia Woolf there were legions of tedious self-regarding monologuists, showing off to an imagined posterity.

As to predictive programs and I-Tunes "Genius", don't they serve a useful and very old-fashioned purpose? Like your best friend, or the cheerful proprietor of the neighbourhood bookstore, or the dreadlocked manager of your favourite record shop, they know what you like and will helpfully alert you when that artist/writer or, someone operating in a similar field, is about to produce.
"You'll love the latest Alice Munro. And if you like Devendra Banhart, check out Vetiver." But unlike your best friend, or the long-vanished bookstore owner, or the former manager of the defunct record shop — all of whom made a number of unintentionally insulting errors of taste — these predictive programs get it right 90 per cent of the time. I am willing to trade my free will – surely already compromised by my birthplace, my parents' religion and circumstances, my genetic inheritance — for these time-saving and life-enriching programs.

I'm alarmed, though, at the prospect that I might have to understand exactly how they work; I cannot imagine buckling down to reviews of "the structures of software", alongside critiques of the new biographies of John Cheever or Ayn Rand. I had always assumed that one of the pleasures of civilization was being relieved of our ancestors' obligation to know how things work. I open my fridge in the morning and, while I am aware that it achieves its effect with compressed gas and electricity, I could not tell you how it works, only that it is pleasingly cold. I reach for a pint of milk, untroubled by my ignorance of modern milking techniques, and my landline rings, by a process which, for all I know, might as well be sorcery.

There are many things I do not know and do not care to know, and I am sure refrigerator engineers, cattle farmers and telephone operatives would have no desire to acquaint themselves with my own small area of expertise. Granted, I find computers more intrinsically interesting than fridges or phones or cows and I did spend some time learning MS-DOS and html code. But in our fast-moving age, these skills are now as useful to me as fluency in Greenlandic Norse or Crimean Gothic. I no longer have the time or patience to find out how it works; just show me what it does.

There is an anxiety that we're all like fat frat boys gorging ourselves at the free, 24-hour, all-you-can-read information buffet. Even here, though, in bouts of online gluttony, we display timeless human traits: the urge to binge in times of plenty, feasting till we're queasy on roasted mammoth, since instinct tells us there might be nothing to eat out there again for a month or two. But our systems are their own regulators. We can only take so much. After a while we long for a simple glass of water, an indigestion pill and wholesome human pleasures, which may or may not involve a book (electronic or paper), music (ipod or live), sport, landscape, love. And as one of your correspondents writes, the young — for whom digital innovation is an unremarkable fact of life — are better at handling the screen-life balance than their seniors, who are too often awestruck by innovation and waylaid by serendipity. The young take for granted today's surfeit of mammoths and they moderate their intakes accordingly.

I wonder about the suggestion that ideas are now facing some kind of Darwinian Day of Judgment, where perfectly sound, original and useful notions will be consigned to the Flames of Oblivion simply because they've run out of room upstairs in the Heavenly Hall of Fame. Surely it was ever thus. There has always been too much information — far more than a single human brain could handle — for the curious and literate with access to a library. Now everyone can have a go. We are all innocents at large in this pleasuredome, agog in Alexandria.

To baulk at this ease of access, to pathologise online abuse and ignorance, is to behave like a medieval monk, horrified by the dawn of secular literacy and fearful that his illuminated manuscripts will fall into unclean hands. There will always be more penny dreadfuls than priceless masterworks; there is only one Book of Kells but there are many, many Da Vinci Codes. And there is room for them all. No shortage of shelf space here. No shortage of readers, either.

You might be frowning into your screen over findings on the absence of retroviral restriction in cells of the domestic cat, he might be surfing Google News for updates on Britney's latest tour, she might be assessing commercial possibilities of hydrogen-producing algae, while they browse the UFO sites, book a cheap flight, and check the last stanza of a John Donne sonnet. It's all there for the taking. How you use it is the point. And who knows? The Britney fan, who might never have strayed into a library in his life, could one day find himself momentarily sidetracked by a website about the New Zealand poet Charles Edgar Spear, click through a hyperlink to TS Eliot and develop a passion for modernist verse. Or, more likely, drawn by a wittily-worded account of Britney's current Australian tour in one of Mr Murdoch's publications, he might eschew his libertine ways, shell out for an online subscription to the newspaper, and settle down to a life of blameless monogamy.

At a dinner in the mid-sixties, the composer John Cage handed me a copy of Norbert Wiener's book, Cybernetics. He was talking about "the mind we all share" in the context of "the cybernetic idea". He was not talking Teilhard de Chardin, the Noosphere, or any kind of metaphysics.

The cybernetic idea was built from Turing's Universal Machine in the late thirties; Norbert Wiener's work during World War II on automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns; John von Neumann's theory of automata and its applications (mid-forties); Claude Shannon's landmark paper founding information theory in 1948.

What exactly is "the cybernetic idea"? Well, it's not to be confused with the discipline of cybernetics, which hit a wall, and stopped evolving during the 1950s. And it's not your usual kind of idea. The cybernetic idea is an invention. A very big invention. The late evolutionary biologist Gregory Bateson called it the most important idea since the idea of Jesus Christ.

The most important inventions involve the grasping of a conceptual whole, a set of relationships which had not been previously recognized. This necessarily involves a backward look. We don't notice it. An example of this is the "invention" of talking. Humans did not notice that they were talking until the day someone said, "We're talking." No doubt the first person to utter such words was considered crazy. But that moment was the invention of talking, the recognition of pattern which, once perceived, had always been there.

So how does this fit in with the cybernetic idea?

It's the recognition that reality itself is communicable. It's the perception that the nonlinear extension of the brain's experience — the socialization of mind — is a process that involves the transmission of neural pattern — electrical, not mental — that's part of a system of communication and control that functions without individual awareness or consent.

This cybernetic explanation tears the apart the fabric of our habitual thinking. Subject and object fuse. The individual self decreates. It is a world of pattern, of order, of resonances. It's an undone world of language, communication, and pattern. By understanding that the experience of the brain is continually communicated through the process of information, we can now recognize the extensions of man as communication, not as a means for the flow of communication. As such they provide the information for the continual process of neural coding.

How is this playing out in terms of the scenarios presented by Frank Schirrmacher in his comments about the effect of the Internet on our neural processes? Here are some random thoughts inspired by the piece and the discussion:

Danny Hillis once said that "the web is the slime mold of the Internet. In the long run, the Internet will arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds. You can imagine something happening on the Internet along evolutionary lines, as in the simulations I run on my parallel computers. It already happens in trivial ways, with viruses, but that's just the beginning. I can imagine nontrivial forms of organization evolving on the Internet. Ideas could evolve on the Internet that are much too complicated to hold in any human mind." He suggested that "new forms of organization that go beyond humans may be evolving. In the short term, forms of human organization are enabled."

Schirrmacher reports on Gerd Gigerenzer's idea that "thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else."

John Bargh notes that research on the prediction and control of human judgment and behavior, has become democratized. "This has indeed produced (and is still producing) an explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and social environment … we are so rapidly building a database or atlas of unconscious influences and effects that could well be exploited by ever-faster computing devices, as the knowledge is accumulating at an exponential rate." The import of Bargh's thinking is that the mere existence of a social network becomes an unconscious influence on human judgment and behavior.

George Dyson traces how numbers have changed from representing things, to meaning things, to doing things. He points out that the very activity involved in the socialization of mind means that "we have network processes (including human collaboration) that might actually be ideas."

What does all this add up to?

Schirrmacher is correct when when he points out that in this digital age we are going through a fundamental change which includes how our brains function. But the presence or absence of free will is a trivial concern next to the big challenge confronting us: to recognize the radical nature of the changes that are occuring and to grasp an understanding of the process as our empirical advances blow apart our epistemological bases for thinking about who and what we are. "We're talking."

We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things.

This is an observation about the invention of writing, not about "modern technology." "Suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things." What stuff? Phonebooks? Calendars on paper? Clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions? "Suddenly people start forgetting things." When did they ever not forget things? Who was the first man to forget his wedding anniversary?

Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker.

Like Copernicus had a stronger idea than Galen? That was some time ago. Like gothic ribbed vaults being a stronger idea (& effectively replacing) Norman barrel vaults, ca 1100? People have made an effort to remember certain things ever since there have been certain things to remember.

Gerd Gigerenzer, to whom I talked and whom I find a fascinating thinker, notes that thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body.

Fascinating & complex things can & do go on outside the human body and (for that matter) in it; but if they aren't conscious, they aren't thinking. Why isn't natural selection an example of thinking (nature mulling things over) outside the human body? You can say, sure, natural selection is thinking; but then you've merely defined thinking out of existence. A thunderstorm is a very complex & highly organized activity. Does it show that the atmosphere is thinking?

We have a crisis of all the systems that somehow are linked to either thinking or to knowledge.

No we don't. There's no crisis in cable TV. There's no crisis in film-making. There was a crisis in painting, but it's sorting itself out. There's no crisis in architecture — architecture is thriving. What's the basis for this assertion? Except that Schirrmacher is European?