This article was first published in the September 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
A few years ago a Reddit user posted the following question on the site: "If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them about life today?"
The most popular answer was this: "I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers."
It's funny because it's true. Today, there is enough information in the world for every person alive to be given three times as much as was held in the ancient library at Alexandria. It was believed to hold the world's entire store of knowledge. Now nearly all of it is available to anyone with an internet connection. We ought to be living through a new golden age of intellectual exploration, a global Enlightenment. It doesn't quite feel that way, does it?
When you looked around at your fellow commuters this morning, they were all locked into their smartphone screens, playing games or looking at pictures of a friend's puppy. Twenty years ago, at least half of them would have been reading a book or a newspaper. What they were reading might not always have been very edifying, but they were making at least the pretence of an interest in the world outside their own bubble.
We know the internet's irresistible power to entertain can distract us from even the smallest effort to enrich our understanding of the world. But there is a second, subtler way in which it endangers the spirit of enquiry. By making answers so available, it can even degrade our capacity to ask questions.
Aristotle called curiosity "the desire to know". The itch of curiosity arises in what the psychologist George Loewenstein calls an "information gap": the gap between what you know and what you know you don't know. If you don't grow interested in your own ignorance, you quickly become incurious. The trouble is that Google and Wikipedia are so stunningly efficient, we spend little time inside that gap.
The questions we ask of the internet don't linger inside our minds for very long, and, as a result, they have little time to develop and deepen. When we get an immediate answer, the question disappears, along with our curiosity. When Google's head of search, Amit Singhal, was asked if people are getting better at articulating their search queries, he sighed and said: "The more accurate the machine gets, the lazier the questions become."
None of this is to say that the internet is making us incurious. It can't do that: the wonderful thing about curiosity is that nobody can take it away from you. Indeed, Google and Wikipedia are the greatest tools for curiosity ever invented. Every day, they launch millions of journeys of intellectual exploration. But you have to decide to use them that way. Curiosity is a choice. According to psychologists, there are, broadly speaking, two types of curiosity. Diversive curiosity is the simple desire for new answers: it's what drives us to turn over a rock or click on the dailymail.co.uk sidebar. It requires minimal effort -- it's more of an instinct. Epistemic curiosity is the quest for knowledge and understanding. It's about the pursuit of new questions. To someone who practises epistemic curiosity, an answer is just a tantalising reminder of what she doesn't yet know.
The internet is an amazing machine for generating diversive curiosity. But epistemic curiosity requires conscious effort: reading the book referenced in the Wikipedia page; not being satisfied with the first answer you get on Google. We also need more online spaces that cultivate the art of asking. Quora, for instance, is a showcase for great questions as much as a forum for answers. Kevin Kelly, founding father of US WIRED, put it like this: "When answers become cheap, good questions become more difficult and more valuable." Let those questions incubate in your mind, and don't let your curiosity be killed by cats.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
