Reading Deeply: How The Internet May Limit Our Autonomy

Traditionally, human beings and tools are thought to be in a simple relationship with one another. All agency is located in the person, consequently making the human being the sole object of power which acts on its subject, the tool. As we move forward into an era of increasingly powerful digital technologies, this model has to be re-examined. Instead of a one-way relationship in which the human agent has total control as the sole actor and the tool is merely the object acted upon – a mere means to an end which the human agent has in mind, it would be more accurate today in the face of digital technology, specifically the internet, to recognize that tools also act on their users.1 In fact, digital technology, particularly the internet, offers potential complications into human beings’ discussion and understanding of free will; even as the internet appears to open up options and capacities for individuals to exercise increased autonomy, it also has the potential to change the very ways in which human beings think, thereby impeding human capacities for meaningful self-reflection, a necessary if not sufficient criterion for rational autonomy.

The problem with Benkler’s analysis is that it reaches too far without addressing a more fundamental aspect of autonomy first: an agent is said to be autonomous in acting if and only if the agent can be said to be, to some extent3, “ultimately” responsible for itself. Information networks certainly increase the available capacities for individual autonomy, but more options does not necessarily mean more freedom. Benkler should have landed here in his evaluation: “Human beings who live in a material and social context that lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in their own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others, are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency” (139, emphasis added). It is in this “greater realm” for agency that we can see the value of the information network economy to individual autonomy. But again, having a greater realm within which to make autonomous decisions does not translate to greater autonomy since individual autonomy is contingent on an agent’s ability or lack thereof to make self-caused decisions and meaningfully reflect on the motivations for such decisions.

In an article in The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr argues that the internet is fundamentally changing how our brains work and how our minds function.4 He attempts to demonstrate that the way in which we interact with texts is evolving as use of the internet increases, which in turn affects our ways of thinking, both at a conceptual level and a biological level, and sees these shifts in our mental lives as potentially problematic. In fact, Carr’s reasoning can be taken a step further to offer a critique to Benkler’s praise of the internet’s potential for augmenting individual autonomy.

Carr argues by moving from anecdotal accounts to social and psychological theory to empirical studies and ends at essentially philosophical conclusions.5 This is formally speaking a valid method of argumentation: start with ordinary experience, offer established theories with authoritative sources as possible explanations of these experiences, substantiate said theories with (scientifically accumulated) empirical evidence, and form a conclusion about the nature of the experience which started the chain of inquisition. What does this form of argumentation offer us, then?

First, it seems evident that “the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.” Since the brain is plastic throughout most of a person’s life, according to James Olds, as a person changes the way he or she uses technology to read, his or her brain will change as well. Carr offers the historical example of Friedrich Nietzsche to supplement this point: after buying a typewriter to assist him as his eyesight began to fail, “[Nietzsche’s] already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.”

Nietzsche’s writing – the direct expression of his thinking – had been changed as his medium of writing changed.6 This is but a particular example of Carr’s greater argument that technology7 affects how we think. Carr demonstrates this through an image of a philosopher and a typewriter, and we see it today through most people’s interactions with the internet. Carr cites a recently published study of online research habits conducted by scholars from University College London which found that “people using [two popular research sites that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information] exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ‘bounce’ out to another site.” He explains these findings through the lens of a book by psychologist Maryanne Wolf: the kind of reading promoted by the internet8 may actually predispose us to engaging in surface-level readings rather than meaningful deep readings of texts. As a result of this, our ability to interpret text for ourselves – a key component of free thought and autonomous rationality – is deadened by engaging in this peculiar kind of reading.

This is where the influence of tools on human beings becomes most apparent and most frightening. This is no longer within the realm of changing “merely” how we read and write, but it begins to get at the ways in which changes in those two processes transform the very ways we think, which in turn augment or limit our ability to meaningfully engage with reality.

It is worth quoting Carr at length: “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking” (emphasis added).

Deep thinking is a necessary component of true rational autonomy. According to many defenders of free will and/or moral responsibility,9 if an agent is to be truly rationally autonomous10 it must be able to engage in critical introspection. This is because an agent must be able to identify the source of its own actions and decisions and reflect on its own motives, changing them according to choice rather than allowing them to be formed and shaped exclusively by social, biological, psychological, or other deterministic forces.11 In order to truly and meaningfully engage in introspection, an agent must be capable of deep thinking, since such a performance requires immense reading skills due to the multitude of psychological barriers many human beings put up between their capacities for self-perception and their understandings of their inner selves in order to avoid possibly painful revelations that they are not ready to hold.12 The internet changes how we read and thereby impedes our ability to engage in meaningful deep reading, thus hampering our ability to engage in meaningful introspection. This makes it enormously difficult to claim significant degrees of rational autonomy, and therefore difficult to claim to be deserving of “Kantian Respect.”13