When I said that the only complaints about the authority-polluting internet were from threatened journalists, I was wrong. Listening to a Radio 4 Analysis podcast earlier on in the week (no longer downloadable, but transcript available here, and well worth the read) certain academics were trotting out the usual crowd-pleasing drivel: the internet is dumbing young people down, melting their brains and ruining civilisation in the process.

Their apocalyptic arguments included the following:

1. The use of the internet is “rewiring” young people’s brains. This is an inherently BAD THING.
   
2. Reading on the internet is not the same as reading a book. Online, there’s lots of evidence to show that young people prefer smaller online articles to longer ones. The abstracts of academic papers are far more accessed than the full documents. This is an inherently BAD THING.
3. From the little we can tell about online viewing and learning habits, young people tend to go shallow and broad, rather than focused and deep. This is an inherently BAD THING.
   
4. The “google generation" or “digital natives” are at a disadvantage because they (unlike those who read books) have no idea what is authoritative, and what is not. This is an inherently BAD THING.
   

Let’s take those points in turn, shall we?

1. Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield (who informs Graham Badman's insistence on protecting children's minds) thinks that our brains are being "turned to mush". Yet our brains are rewired regardless of the activity that we undertake; neuroscientist Maryanne Woolfe makes the point that reading isn’t a “natural” human activity either, so our brains also establish neural connections differently ( ie. they rewire) when we begin to engage with the printed word. It seems to me eminently sensible that a brain should rewire itself according to the activity it is called upon to make sense of – including the assimilation of diverse sources of information presented in a variety of media. Without it, human progress would be impossible.
2. Yes, books can be wonderful and technology (even a Kindle) cannot easily replace them. But even “proper literature” is a changing social and cultural construct, despite what Ed Balls might think. Stephen Fry rightly makes the point that books were once considered to be the work of the devil, threatening the sermons and classic texts upheld by the establishment as "authoritative". Today, irrespective of the internet, many more people are happier dipping into “Heat” or “Nuts” than they are sitting down with Anna Karenina. And what on earth do these people think that abstracts were written for in the first place? In any job I’ve ever had, I've read executive summaries of everything, and only returned to the full paper if it's been really necessary or if I've had the spare time. It’s nothing to do with the internet; it’s an approach to task management that is also known as pragmatism (and sometimes laziness).
3. Professor David Nicholas has this to say on the subject of broad and shallow: "This kind of power browsing, navigating, going through the piste very fast, gives you a sort of superficial knowledge. And there’s a shallowness that’s developing as a result of that." Interesting. We are repeatedly told that school and the national curriculum is “good” because it ensures that young people receive a broad education, which is eminently desirable. And now we are told that, if it is to do with the internet, breadth of education is a bad thing. Might this be less to do with the Evil Internet and more to do with insecure academics losing their authoritative foothold, just possibly? Perhaps more of us would know of the joys of losing ourselves in the depths of specialism if we’d not been taught otherwise in the first place.
4. Ah. The nub of the problem. The internet defies traditional authority models. But, in all its variable glory, it is in no way to blame for the young people who reference questionable online sources, indiscriminately assuming that anything in print must be the truth. Those who must shoulder the blame are the self-same traditionalist academics and their prescriptive supporters, distributing text books and mandatory texts, delivering authoritative pronouncements and expecting children to regurgitate facts and theories à la Gradgrind.
   

Instructing children that anything is 100% authoritative and reliable subordinates their natural inclination to formulate their own hypotheses and continually test their own findings against those hypotheses, learning from error and reaching their own valuable conclusions throughout the process. It’s called real learning (whether it happens online or in real life) and it doesn’t rely on the say-so of others, whose authority and objectivity can never, ever be guaranteed – regardless of status, age or qualification.

To quote Don Tapscott, programme participant and author of Grown Up Digital:

"The model of learning has been around for centuries. I call it broadcast learning. I’m a teacher, I have knowledge. You’re a student, you’re an empty vessel, get ready, here it comes! And your goal is to take it into short-term working memory, to practice, through repetition to bring deeper cognitive structures so that you can recall it to me when I test you. Drill and kill. Well this is an inappropriate model...

The issue is what is the model of pedagogy. How do you get people to learn. And even more broadly, what’s the purpose of learning? Is it to fill kids’ heads with facts which they can recall in tests. Well that might have been appropriate for my generation and when you were graduated you were set for life. So what you knew was what counted. Today when you’re graduated you’re set for 15 minutes. So it’s not just what you know when you graduate, it’s your capacity to think and to solve problems and communicate and to learn life long, to reinvent your knowledge base multiple times."

Thank goodness that people such as Stephen Fry, Don Tapscott and Maryanne Woolfe exist and are vocal.

The human pursuit of truth is never hindered by the tools we have at our disposal – whether that is oral tradition, the print press, or digital media. It is hindered by people who would persuade us that they already have the answers to any question we might choose to ask.  And we should always ask ourselves – why would they want to do that?