There were two items published recently which offered different insights into how the Internet has affected our brain functions. The first was an Atlantic cover story titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in which Nicholas Carr wrote of how avid web use has eroded his ability to read long stretches of prose where it was once easy and pleasurable. (The irony being, of course, that the essay in which he argued this point was nearly 5,000 words long.) The other was a study by UCLA memory specialist Gary Small, where he had participants read books and perform web searches while undergoing cognitive brain imaging. The result? Searching the web sped up decision-making and complex reasoning.
Carr's ruminations, however, are not mutually exclusive from the results produced in the lab at UCLA. In fact, I would argue that while I believe my expert handling of hundreds of RSS feeds every day has made me an incredibly skillful and efficient consumer and digester of information, I, like Carr, also find deep, novel-length reading harder than it once was. My pithy hypothesis, then, is that the Internet has made me both smarter and dumber. So be it. I'm not fighting it—instead I'm embracing it as the evolution of human intelligence in an increasingly technology-laden world.
All this to say that I think about the Internet and how it affects me and the world I live in on a consistent basis. I am on the computer every day, for hours on end. It's both my livelihood and a personal obsession. Even when I worked at a major national newspaper, I never read news and analysis in broadsheet form. This morning's paper is no longer just tomorrow's fish-market wrappings—it's already this morning's old news. The Internet, on the other hand, thanks to constant refreshment and the advent of 2.0, is exciting, relevant, and interactive.
And so because I think so much about how the information I garner from the Internet affects me and how I act and react in the real world, I started to think about what I thought was missing from my web life, which increasingly blurs with my real life. Here's what I discovered: I spend a lot of time reading policy and cultural analysis by the established "netroots." And then I spend a lot of time discussing it—online and in person—with other smart, engaged young people. I have had ridiculously stimulating discussions on incredibly important issues with friends on Gchat. On Gchat! From here on, one question lead to the next: Why are we letting these intellectually-charged exchanges waste down an untapped reservoir? Is it because we're in our twenties and don't fit the "netroots" model of middle-aged (possibly gay, possibly male) progressive intellectuals and therefore don't think we could attract the readership they do? How is it that a grassroots movement doesn't have young people at or near its helm?
That's when the Whyroots idea was born. I wanted a place where smart, curious writers and thinkers in my age demographic could share their voices and challenge each other to consistently think about the most important policy and cultural issues. Individually, at most, we are over-educated, plugged-in, driven twentysomethings with a lot of potential. Collectively, at the very least, we will make more of an impact than any of us could on our own. Further, writing with a team will force our ideas to develop and progress, in a way that a solo project wouldn't really allow. I know we have something to add to what's already happening in the netroots, and something new to introduce to it as well. (For more, you can read the mission statement I wrote for our project on the About page.)
What can you expect from my page on Whyroots? I like to think my interests are vast, but I know they are concentrated mostly in politics, so let's start there. I don't think the netroots does enough. "Progressive" netrooters are just as much blind cheerleaders for the Democratic Party as FOX News is for the GOP. Over the past 20 month-long presidential campaign season, I saw a lot of liberal voices forgo their core ideals in the name of political expediency. Some argue that such allowances are necessary in a binary partisan political system such as ours, where our choice is artificially narrowed to Blue or Red, and we might as well fully support the lesser of two evils one-hundred percent or else we might end up with more of the last eight years. I disagree: I think we'll only move the power-wielding center further to the enlightened left by calling them on it, even before an election is won. So you'll see that kind of writing by me here. (One issue I'll start tracking, for example, is the commitment Obama made to the SEIU and other core allies about instituting health care and environmental reform within the first 100 days of his presidency.)
I'll throw in, too, analysis and thoughts about others' writing; ideas about books and technology; and I imagine I'll busy myself with quite a bit of social commentary. And I hope to learn about myself, my thought process, and where my ideas might take me.
As I said earlier, the web has certainly changed the way my brain accepts and processes an enormous array of information on a daily, even hourly basis. With the ever-expanding breadth of information available to us it's become increasingly important to make connections between a multitude of issues, events, and analyses thereof. My hope is that while the Internet may spread us thinner in some ways, a project like Whyroots may give us the opportunity to counter-act those effects and give focus to the many soundbites and headlines that hurdle, incessantly, our way. I suppose, then, that the motivation for Whyroots is a search for both a demographic shift in the netroots and a paradigmatic one, too.
-- Daniela Perdomo
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