Easy access to a variety of information seems to be beneficial to intelligence. The problem, in my opinion, is in the nature of how information is conveyed on the internet. Due to news items, blog posts, tweets and similar things, we are now being bombarded with a larger number of smaller snippets of information, one after the other. I sometimes find myself bookmarking or setting aside certain posts because they are “too long,” expecting to get back to it when I don’t feel like consuming smaller tidbits.
Because I spend so much of my day absorbing many smaller pieces of information, I think I retain less because I’m not dwelling too long on any one subject. With traditional media, like books and newspapers, you are forced to spend more time on a single subject; you concentrate on it and don’t distract yourself often. Imagine approaching traditional media in the way you do the internet: you’d have to sit on the floor, surround yourself with 5–10 newspapers and the same number of books, plus have a couple of TV’s blaring nearby. Now take any one of the items around you, start reading but don’t read for longer than a couple of minutes before switching to another item, then repeat. Do this 20 or 30 times while periodically looking at one of the TV’s and focusing for a few minutes. This is similar to way we browse the internet. Sure, you are probably picking up a few useful pieces of information here and there, but not with the same understanding and command of information as you could be.
The amount of time I’ve spent on the internet the past few years is something I beat myself up over. Especially when I look at my 250+ TBR list and realize I could have been halfway through it if my time spent in books instead of at a computer screen. To be fair though, more than 200 of the books on that list were added because of learning about them on the internet.
There’s also the issue of memorization. Why bother remembering things when you can look them up so easily? Vocabulary, historical dates, etc., are all tools that improve our analysis and understanding of the information we encounter. I think it’s yet to be seen how our cognition and intelligence will change when we don’t keep this information inside our heads anymore. The kind of intelligence displayed on shows like Jeopardy certainly seems to be on the way out.