How has the Internet changed our minds?

Observer

14-05-2025

History teaches us that the advent of the printing press sparked Europe's Enlightenment, while the Ottoman Empire hesitated to embrace it for fear of the upheaval it might bring to established patterns of knowledge and thought. That reluctance contributed to Western ascendancy, laying the groundwork for the intellectual and then industrial revolutions, and it marked the beginning of Ottoman, and by extension Islamic-civilisational stagnation. A similar inflection point occurred at the close of the twentieth century when the Internet emerged from its military and private confines into the wider human sphere. It has since effected an unprecedented shift in global consciousness, quietly penetrating our minds before its influence became undeniable in every aspect of our cognition, memory, reading habits and sense of time.
In the 1960s, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan presciently declared that 'the medium is the message,' suggesting that each new technology not only reflects civilisational progress, but also actively reshapes our perception of the world. At the time, few imagined that the Internet, perhaps the most pervasive medium in history, would impose upon us a new, rapid, yet often superficial mode of knowing, dominated by images and deprived of complex meaning and sustained engagement. It has converted our brains into biological systems that forsake many traditional mental skills, such as deep memorisation, logical reasoning and analytical thought, in favour of instantaneous gratification.
Neuroscience reveals that our brains possess 'neuroplasticity', the capacity to reconfigure neural networks in response to experience. Constant interaction with the Internet - its speed, interactivity and continual stimulus - becomes a repeated neural experience that slowly but inexorably reprogrammes our minds. Over time, we find ourselves unable to tolerate complexity or lengthy texts, craving fragmentation, summaries and immediate satisfaction. This marks a perilous transformation: we lose the depth of understanding, reflection, emotional engagement and intellectual stamina that once sustained us. Reading, no longer a profound cognitive practice, has become a shallow browsing, our eyes flitting from headline to hyperlink without lingering over meaning. We develop what might be called a 'screen mind", incapable of the abstraction and slow accumulation of knowledge afforded by the printed page. Online reading resembles fast food: momentarily filling but offering no real nourishment.
Our memory suffers as well. As the American thinker Nicholas Carr argues in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, we have replaced internal recall with external retrieval. Search engines such as Google serve as extensions of our memory: we no longer retain information, only its location. This fundamental shift, from an inwardly housed knowledge to one reliant on external mediators, erodes deep memory and reduces intelligence to a precarious immediacy based on access rather than understanding.
The Internet's acceleration of temporal experience is equally profound. Where once we measured time by its unfolding, the gradual sediment of lived experience, we now quantify it in notifications, updates and fleeting interactions. Emotions - joy, sorrow - have become transient states, compressed into emoticons and quickly superseded by the next digital wave. This relentless pace weakens our experiential memory, leaving us momentary beings adrift from authentic existential belonging, with neither a genuine past nor a reflective horizon of the future.
Thirty years after the Internet's dawn, as we enter an even more expansive digital era shaped by artificial intelligence, we must ask: is this 'liberation from time' or a detachment from meaning? Does the proliferation of knowledge sources truly make us wiser, or have we lost the equilibrium between intellectual accumulation and digital dispersion? The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han speaks of 'digital burnout', whereby information overload and the absence of patience yield a fragmented self in perpetual pursuit of gratification rather than comprehension.
Yet we cannot deny the Internet's immense promise: access to digital libraries, online courses and global lectures have forged new pathways of knowledge. The challenge does not lie in the tool itself but in our undisciplined digital habits and our inclination towards the easiest, quickest stimuli. What we need is a reclamation of cognitive sovereignty: training ourselves in intellectual patience, slow contemplation, extended reading and rigorous analysis instead of perfunctory scrolling.
Our brains, built as they are from neurons, are equally shaped by habits of mind. If algorithms have transformed our thinking, we possess the will, awareness and deliberate choice to remould those algorithms ourselves. The true battle of our age is not against the Internet, but against the mental distortions born of its hasty use. The Internet remains one of humanity's most powerful technical achievements, capable of reshaping human consciousness for the better, so long as we remain vigilant against the lure of speed and superficiality.
Dr Muamar bin Ali Al Tobi
The writer is an academic and researcher