The message here is actually quite simple: we probably don’t want to be wheeled around on an Internet Trolley. Our critical capacity to review and interpret documents on the Internet is diminished if we are passive. We become “lazy” in our reliance on a few sources of Internet information that conform to our existing beliefs. We do very little accommodating to information that is changing of our existing mind set. We don’t kick the tires of the Internet to see if it is providing information that is valid and useful. Our assumptive world remains unchallenged—and we live with nothing but passively-received, self-fulfilling and self-sealing thoughts, feelings and behaviors Argyris and Schon, 1974). In many ways, this passivity leads to the dominance of procedural, habitual processing – and to the decline (or even death) of expository mental processes.
There is another challenge offered to the role played by expository processes by the Internet. There is a strong temptation when relying on the Internet to be superficial in our reactions to and contemplation of the content conveyed by this medium. The postmodernist critic. Frederick Jameson (1991, p. 25) describes this as the “heaps of fragments” to be found contemporary thought. It is not just a matter of short attention span—it is also a matter of not connecting the dots and not doing the hard work of incorporating new material in with the existing material (particularly if the new material doesn’t fit nicely in the existing schemata). We simply leave things in an undifferentiated mess—what Jameson (1991, p. 25) identifies as a practice of “the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory.”
If there is any integration occurring, it is likely to be done by some “expert” or “guru” of the Internet. We don’t avail ourselves of our own life experiences, nor do we take advantage of the rich diversity to be found on the globalized network. We are entering the digital Library of Congress and are likely to feel the overwhelm of too many choices. As a result, we decide to just return to an area of the library where we have sat before and by the books that we already know and have read. To think deeply requires a sustained, reflective process of assimilation which is partnering with an active search for new information that might be discordant and certainly will be challenging and expansive of our own assumptive world and epistemological base.
The Internet of Retention
What finally do we do about the process of forgetting—given that the Internet doesn’t forget? On the one hand, as we noted regarding the flashbulb memory, there are certain memories that we should never forget. These memories teach us, repeatedly, what is life-threatening and what is life-affirming. Many of these memories are stored in the Amygdala which does not have any of the neurochemicals needed for us to forget something. The Amygdala is in the business of essentially assessing three things about our entering stimuli (information about our environment): is the entity on which we are focusing good or bad (regarding our welfare), is this entity strong or weak, and is this entity active or passive.
