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I recently read some very interesting books, specifically The Narcissism Epidemic and The Shallows.

The Narcissism Epidemic traces the skyrocketing rise of narcissism in US culture. While I won't detail them here, the statistics in the book are carefully detailed, well thought out, and supported by double blind studies. Among the more interesting sections of the book was showing the correlation between Web 2.0 (MySpace, Twitter, etc) and narcissism. Even more interesting were the new studies that show that narcissists actually have high self-esteem. The prevailing opinion (based on Freud) had been that narcissists had low self-esteem and that narcissism was a reaction to the underlying feelings of inferiority. Using implicit response tests, clinical studies are instead showing that narcissists have very high self-esteem combined with low empathy. Narcissists are selfish and mean to others not because they feel bad about themselves but because they genuinely think others are sheep and they are lions. So rather than combat narcissism, self-esteem therapy actually makes it worse. Other studies shared in the book find that having high self-esteem does not cause increased performance or success – instead it’s the other way around; successful people develop self-esteem. Self-esteem itself cannot cause success, and in fact causes the opposite – when students in double blind tests have their self-esteem improved with all other things controlled, their academic performance plummets. Meanwhile, Asian teens report the lowest self-esteem of any in their age group, while showing the highest overall success in academics and careers. So the overall theme of the book is that we are pursuing the wrong psychological goal (self-esteem) and that it actually leads to a highly destructive personality (narcissism), and that our technology (Web 2.0) is just making it worse.

The Shallows, meanwhile, discusses the impact of the Internet on how we think and learn. It begins with an exhaustive survey of the recent work in brain plasticity. Interestingly it also refers back to Freud, although in this case Freud got it right -- he claimed that the brain was plastic, but 150 years of neurologists after him claimed the adult human brain was fixed. Recent work using the latest in imaging tools has been able to demonstrate this is entirely false. Adult human brains are not just malleable, they are highly plastic, constantly changing. One of the biggest causes of brain change is what the book calls "intellectual technology," i.e. technology that interacts with how we think. The book argues that the Internet is an exceptionally problematic intellectual technology because it demands more of our working memory and less of our long-term memory. As explained in the book, our working memory is largely fixed in size, while our long-term memory grows the more we demand of it. Having our working memory eaten up by distractions of the net slows down our processing time, while our long-term memory stays empty. One might ask, why does that matter? The internet offers a better long-term memory than any of us will ever have! However, it turns out that long-term memory is integral to how the brain forms "schemas", what might be called the wisdom of experience that is used to solve problems, and that long-term memory is highly dynamic - each time the memory is called up, it is subtly altered in relation to its correlation with all other long-term memories. The more we "outsource" our long-term memory to computers, the fewer schemas we can develop in our minds, and the fewer correlations our thoughts have with each other. The notion that outsourcing our long-term memory needs to Wikipedia frees up cognitive space for deep thought is thus totally wrong; instead we become shallow thinkers capable of spouting facts we've just read, but not able to cross-reference these thoughts and form our own deeply held understanding.

It's hard to have an optimistic view of the world after reading the two books, and even harder to have an optimistic view of the Internet. It certainly changes my sense of what it means to be "engaged" with Web 2.0.