Log off from the internet and reclaim your life

Who among the first evangelists of the internet foresaw this? When they gushingly described the still emerging technology as "transformational", it was surely the media or information, rather than political, landscapes they had in mind.

It was on Facebook that the now legendary Mohammad Bouazizi video showing a vegetable seller immolating himself was posted, and on Facebook that subsequent demonstrations were organised. Who knows, if the people of Tunis one day build a Freedom Square, perhaps they'll make room for a statue of Mark Zuckerberg.

If that sounds fanciful, note the Egyptian newborns named simply ‘Facebook'. But what about the rest of us, those unlikely ever to go online to organise an insurrection? What has been the transformative effect on us? How is the internet changing the way you think?

Given the subject I thought it wise to float that question on Twitter. As if to vindicate the "wisdom of crowds" thesis often pressed by internet cheerleaders, the range of responses mirrored precisely the arguments raised in the expert essays collected by editor John Brockman in his new book.

There are the idealists, grateful for a tool that has enabled them to think globally. They are now plugged into a range of sources, access to which would once have required effort, expense and long delays. It's not just faraway information that is within reach, but faraway people — activists are able to connect with like-minded allies on the other side of the world.

As Newsnight's Paul Mason noted: "During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these."

No less hopeful are the egalitarians who believe the internet, and social media in particular, have flattened the old hierarchies that put purveyors of information at the top of the pyramid and consumers down below.

"I think that social boundaries have become more porous," mused one tweeter. "Without it I wouldn't be able to have this informal chat with you." The end of deference is a theme, with several suggesting that where once they had to believe what they were told, they can now check for themselves.

But in my unscientific survey the Pollyannas were outnumbered by the Cassandras, even among people whose Twitter habit might suggest internet zeal. There were laments for what more than one essayist in the anthology calls the "outsourcing of the mind". As a respondent to my Twitter appeal put it: "Sadly I think less and google more."

No social inhibitions

Others raised the now hoary question of anonymity and its tendency to remove the usual social inhibitions that encourage courtesy. Just as the car windscreen makes people ruder than they would ever dare to be exposed as mere pedestrians, so the presence of a computer screen can release a darker side, coarsening relations between strangers. For reasons not yet fully understood, the internet seems to have robbed many of embarrassment.

But these were mere side notes. The biggest complaint, in both my Twitter sample and the expert essays, was about the quality of thinking in the online era. What the internet has done, say the dissenters, is damage our ability to concentrate for sustained periods. This, the worriers fear, is not just irritating; it might even damage our civilisation. How capable will people be of creating great works if they are constantly interrupted, even when alone?

But it goes beyond mere distraction. The nature of the work itself changes. One tweeter complained of the internet producing ‘Pot Noodle knowledge', instant and thin. The online bias towards the immediate is strong, forcing us into a permanent ‘now', weakening our sensitivity to the past and even to the future.

The impact of all this is not confined to the quality of intellectual inquiry. It's affecting family life, too. I recall the friend who saw a counsellor for advice about his disruptive children. Diagnosis: they were playing up to wrest attention from parents who had one eye forever on the BlackBerry.

The result, says essayist Douglas Rushkoff, is that the internet has made him "resentful and short-fused", stressed by the pressure to be available and to respond now.

But he has a valuable insight. It's not the internet itself that's doing this. It's the advent particularly of the smartphone, turning the internet from an occasional, ‘opt-in' activity to what Rushkoff calls an ‘always on' condition of my life. The internet is no longer just on your desk, but in your pocket.

We cannot turn back time. Nor, given the internet's power for good currently on display around the Middle East, should we want to. But we need to reassert control. We need, in short, to rediscover the off switch.

Jonathan Freedland writes a weekly column for the Guardian.