LAUSR

In their article The Digital Expansion of the Mind: Impliations of Internet Usage for Memory and Cognition, (Marsh nd Rajaram, 2019) highlight ten properties of the Internet and iscuss the seven very different possible implications for how e think, process, and use information. Beyond merely listing ascinating behaviors, the authors implicitly identify a set of mportant effects on humans—for both good an ill—and in the rocess, illuminate several directions for research on the ways n which the internet is influencing all of us. The key idea of the paper is that properties of the technology hat we call “the internet” has potentially profound implications or cognition. In many ways, this is the inevitable consequence f any information technology, with the internet simply being he technology of the moment. The effects of almost every nformation technology have heavily influenced cognition. The echnology of writing, with its ability to store information that ranscends time, giving the written word the ability to instruct nd inform future generations, was the first big cognitive amplication technology. In the same way, the ability to organize nformation according to a predefined sort order (such as alphaetizing by title, or in taxonomies as with the Dewey Decimal ystem or the Library of Congress Subject Headings) gives umans entirely new powers to organize content into searchable ollections. With each information technology came a host of problems long with worries about whether or not the effects of the techology would be permanent and/or damaging to human thought. ost famously, Plato wrote of his concerns in Phaedrus, (Plato, 70 BCE) where he commented on worries about writing (as a echnology), saying that writing is an inhuman way to capture nowledge. By attempting to turn living thoughts, with all their ichness and detail, into mere scratchings on paper, people will amage their abilities to reason and remember. Plato, on writing: