Sometimes drunk texts are great. A former girlfriend once rekindled our dormant relationship because she said, “I still love you”—in a 3:00 a.m. text from 500 miles away. If not for some liquid confidence and the ability to communicate as quickly as we blink, we might never have reconnected.
Usually, though, people regret their drunk texts. The free market has produced a brilliant solution for our inadvertent bursts of honesty. Two University of Virginia juniors recently developed an iPhone application called “Drunk Mode” that lets you temporarily block numbers from your contacts. You set the block’s duration, up to 12 hours—useful for marathon days like LDOC. Then there’s “SelfControl,” a computer-based app that blocks selected websites. Lots of my friends turn on SelfControl when they need to churn out a paper; it helps them—makes them—avoid Facebook, Buzzfeed or ForeignPolicy.com. (My friends are odd.) Whatever your online temptation, SelfControl can resist it for you. Whoever your secret crush, Drunk Mode can keep it secret. What does this externalization of discipline do to our internal self-discipline? We’ll come back to that.
In his Pulitzer Prize finalist book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” Nicholas Carr describes how the Internet is changing the way we think and remember. When we have unlimited access to information through web searches and databases, we no longer need to retain information. When we focus on many sources at once (how many browser tabs do you have open right now?), we cease to practice the art of sustained attention. More and more during college, I’ve struggled to focus while reading for classes. Maybe it’s because I’m immersed in an overwhelming torrent of information. I think my attention span has shrunk because of relentless texts, Facebook updates, news articles, emails from professors and other media that I consume. Rather than thinking in terms of theories and themes, I often find myself thinking in Google search terms. We don’t need to retain information anymore because it’s readily available at the tip of our fingers. Why remember, when we can just find?
Humans benefit from the externalization of memory because we can manipulate exponentially more information. We don’t have to cling to specific facts and figures like our ancestors did in oral cultures. But this outsourcing has serious side effects. Think about the Affordable Care Act, which made sweeping changes to health insurance and sprawled over a whopping 906 pages. What if no one had the mental capacity to consider the bill as a whole? What if lawmakers and even their healthcare staffers only comprehended bits and pieces and missed the big picture? We could never predict the consequences, let alone watch for unfair loopholes. On a very different level, our appreciation of literature might diminish: If I can’t focus long enough to read a Facebook post, how will I ever follow the intricate plot of a Gabriel García Márquez novel?
Fear of new technology is not new. The revolutionary and frightening technology before the Internet was written language. A character in Plato’s “Phaedrus” bemoaned the shift from an oral culture to a written one that would “implant forgetfulness in their souls: They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written.” When Gutenberg’s printing press made books more widely available, some people feared an information deluge. The Spanish playwright Lope de Vega bemoaned the new invention in a 1612 play: “So many books—so much confusion! / All around us an ocean of print. / And most of it covered in froth.”
The Internet externalizes memory more drastically than writing and the printing press did. I worry that it also externalizes self-control in a way that is new and frightening. With apps like SelfControl and Drunk Mode, we outsource an essential human capability: delaying gratification. This is dangerous because self-control is a muscle that needs to be exercised. We get better at controlling our impulses when we practice it. Think back to the classic marshmallow experiment: give 4-year-olds a marshmallow and tell them they can have a second one—if they don’t eat the first while sitting alone in a room, just them and the marshmallow. Some kids were better at waiting than others. For others, impulse defeated long-term thinking; they immediately ate the single marshmallow. Forty years later, the children with better self-control got more than an extra marshmallow. In the long run, they had higher SAT scores, more successful relationships and less drug abuse. Using apps to discipline ourselves helps in the short term, but diminishes our internal self-discipline over time. As the skill weakens, will that affect other areas of our lives?
I fear a world in which we rely on the Internet for self-control as well as memory. Imagine your office in 2050. No one bothers to remember anything; coworkers have to Google “stapler” to figure out where they left the office stapler. Self-discipline is also gone; managers have to implement an automated system of minor electric shocks to condition people to stay off social media. Workplace productivity declines. Family ties suffer as parents answer emails on their smartphones rather than bonding with young children. I fear that technology could be our downfall. The diabolical supercomputer from “2001: A Space Odyssey” won’t take control—but what happens if we lose our self-control?
Andrew Kragie is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Tuesday.
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