With the science, information and technological boom in the past few decades, the internet has become the ubiquitous resource when it comes to acquiring information and knowledge. However increased use of search engines and other websites to acquire information has also given rise to questions about its effect on intelligence and behavior, especially in the case of children and adolescents. Children and adolescents are more likely to be affected as they are in their formative years and are highly susceptible. Access to information that is just a click away and this can lead to a mistaken belief and illusion that access is equivalent to understanding or intelligence. This paper aims to prove that increased use of the internet and access to a plethora of information does not necessarily lead to an increased level of intelligence in kids but also affects their emotional intelligence as well.
Research Questions
What are the effects of the internet on adolescents?
Does the internet create an illusion of intelligence in its users, especially adolescents or does it actually make them intelligent?
What are its effects on emotional intelligence and social behavior?
Various studies imply that internet use leads to an inflated sense of intelligence and also affects the emotional intelligence and behavior of the users, especially adolescents (Fisher et al, 2015, der Merwe, 2014, Dewey, 2015, Kaplan, 2015). This paper uses information from existing studies on this topic, such as journal articles, newspaper and magazine articles and statistics to show how the internet affects the cognitive skills of adolescents. Although it is quite early to come to any concrete conclusion about the actual effects of the internet on the adolescent brain (as the internet has been around for only less than two decades in its current form and changes rapidly), it can be argued that increased usage and reliance on the internet for knowledge seeking does not make teenagers more intelligent. Rather it leads to other problems such as attention deficiency, lack of focus, inflated sense of intelligence and behavioral problems.
The internet is an enabler to know more and should not be credited with increased level of intelligence. The aim of this paper is to prove that the internet does not lead to increased intelligence but only acts as an effective tool to find answers and entertain oneself. The internet usage of children and adolescents should be monitored as a false assumption of the correlation between increased intelligence and the internet can lead to future problems when it comes to application of the knowledge, social adaptability and actual intelligence.
Internet Use and Adolescent Intelligence
Although the internet has been around for over three decades now, it has become ubiquitous in the past two decades. Children, adolescents and adults alike use the internet in their daily lives for different purposes. From schoolwork, entertainment, office work, gaming, social interaction to help with mundane tasks, the internet is used by millions around the world in their everyday life. The internet is a highly interactive and information laden/driven medium that connects users all over the world. Adolescents today are a generation of internet users, having been born when the internet started becoming widely available and easily accessible. Recent statistics show that the internet use among adolescents is quite high. Statistics from the Pew Research Center for the year 2015 shows that almost 24% of teenagers can be found online almost constantly due to the availability of smartphones, tablets and other devices. The report further states that “92% of teens report going online daily including 24% who say they go online “almost constantly,” More than half (56%) of teens defined in this report as those ages 13 to 17 go online several times a day, and 12% report once-a-day use. Just 6% of teens report going online weekly, and 2% go online less often (Lenhart,2015).” A report from Statista shows that 95% of teenagers in the US access internet and are also highly present in social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter (Statista, 2016). These statistics show that not only is a high percentile of teenagers are online but that they also spend a lot of time on the internet. Adolescents use the internet for various purposes. They use the internet to find the coolest places to hang out, shop, finish their homework, stay in touch with friends and family, post pictures of themselves and any interesting things they have seen or been a part of , playing games, etc. Thus the internet is used not just for gaining knowledge or information but also as a means of social interaction. An adolescent can spend hours online without having read a single article or done anything that might be helpful for school. It is also possible that a lot of time is spent chatting with friends.
Owing to the recent explosion of social media, the ever changing nature of the internet and the number of years that the internet has been around, studies about the effect of internet on adolescent intelligence and behavior remains varied. While it cannot be denied that the internet offers various means of knowledge seeking and that there is a plethora of information and data available on almost everything, it is also true that not all the information found on the internet is true. There is also the fact that there is a huge amount of information that is not suitable for adolescent and children and that there exists no foolproof mechanism to filter the information they have access to. Internet can be accessed through laptops, desktops, tablets and mobile phones and given this scenario it would be a difficult task to monitor the internet use in children and find out what they view and how it affects them. The connect, click and view mechanism that the internet affords its users makes it easier for a person to collect information easily from anywhere in the world. User driven content has also enabled accessing data easier. This means that an adolescent is bombarded with information constantly or every time he or she spends online. Unlike parents or teachers who cannot spend every waking hour with the adolescent, the devices are always around. Especially with cheaper mobile devices, most kids are always connected. This level of connection and online activity normally affects young people in many ways both positive and negative. Some authors contend that the internet enables adolescents to perform well in standardized test scores and also make them self-directed learners (Packard, 2007). Although this is true, the learning success mostly depends on how many minutes or hours that the kids actually spend learning from the internet. Social media and instant messaging apps mean that not all the time spent online is spent on learning. Mobile devices offer multiple channels of communication and enable multitasking. While an adolescent can spend hours online, most of it could be spent just browsing or interacting with other people. An editorial on Wall Street Journal published in 1994 defines intelligence as, “a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do (Gottfredson, 1997).” Based on this definition of intelligence, it could be said that the internet does not fulfil all the criteria to make a person intelligent. The internet is rather a tool that helps find information quickly. Too much time spent on the internet will prevent the kids from going out and interacting with other people or applying and focusing themselves on one particular issue at a time. Easy and readymade answers mean that a teenager can answer questions or do their assignments without having to read a lot or know a lot about a certain topic. Making sense of the world around them, comprehending complex ideas and problem solving skills come from interaction with people in their everyday life and learning from a variety of sources. The internet tends to condense information or lead a use towards a narrow understanding of concepts when they already start with a bias. This is very true of adolescents as they are in their formative years, quick to learn, easily susceptible and vulnerable to take the truth at its surface. Having found an answer to a question, there remains very little incentive to delve deeper into the issue. Especially in case of homework or assignments, adolescents would rather prefer to do them quickly than spending hours working on them. In this case, the knowledge they gain would be task specific and be forgotten quickly. Lack of deeper understanding would also mean that they would fail to apply this in real life.
A study on the internet use and adolescent intelligence is necessary as they are the first generation that have grown along with the boom in the internet and would be perfect candidates to analyze how it affects the human brain and social development. Results from these kinds of studies would also help in knowing what measures can be taken in the future to offset these effects. Studies on the internet and its effects on adolescents show that they do learn a lot from the internet but not all of these are beneficial to them. Research also shows that too much time spent on the internet affects emotional intelligence as well as create an inflated version of their own intelligence and capability.
This paper aims to show how the internet affects adolescents in different ways. The first part “how does the internet affect adolescents” deals with a general analysis of how the internet affects children and adolescents and lists the positive and negative aspects of internet use. The second part, “inflates estimates of knowledge” deals with how the internet instead of creating intelligent adolescents just creates an illusion of intelligence and inflates the sense of knowing. The third part deals with how the internet affects the emotional intelligence of its users, especially young children and adolescents. The final part of the paper is the conclusion which prove that the various studies available on internet use and adolescents show that there are more negative effects of prolonged internet use for the kids than positive effects and that the internet does not necessarily make the kids any smarter.
Methodology
This paper analyzes existing information on the effects on internet on children and adolescents and this section outlines the strategies used for search and the selection criteria. It also provides descriptions of the different types of articles and studies that has been reviewed so far. Relevant information on the general effects of the internet on adolescents were taken from the numerous articles that can be found on online magazines such as the Washington post, huffington Post etc, and other websites such as Statistica and Pew Research Center. The search terms for the analysis remained broad to ensure that relevant studies on the topic were not missed. The search terms that were used were, ‘ Internet use and adolescents’, Internet and teenage intelligence’, ‘Effects of the internet on children and young adults’ etc. Studies that focused on the internet and emotional intelligence of the teenagers, internet and teenage behavior were used for the study. The internet is a relatively new concept and the way adolescents interact with it changes quite often. What was a few websites and search engines in the beginning has now metamorphosed into a millions of websites and apps that call for a different focus with each change. Academic studies on this field is also quite limited and varied as academics, scientists and other authors try to understand how the internet work in different ways. It is also important to understand how adolescents from different countries react to the internet owing to the availability and accessibility of sites and information. Since the adolescents are the first generation of people to be born and raised in the internet era, the studies can only be ongoing and no concrete answers can be given. However, this study only aims to analyze the question of internet use and increased intelligence in adolescents and narrows down the existing information. A sample study would not be sufficient to deal with this topic as teenage behaviors and internet use changes drastically depending on the region, country and affordability of the people. Thus this study uses only existing studies and information to prove that the internet does not necessarily make adolescents any smarter. The research questions of this paper are-What are the effects of the internet on adolescents? How does the internet create an illusion of intelligence in its users, especially adolescents and What are its effects on emotional intelligence and social behavior? The various published materials are sorted according to these research questions to come with the findings and results.
Results and Findings
The statistics gleaned from websites such as Statista and Pew Research Center show that over 90% of adolescents use the internet on a daily basis. They are mostly connected to the internet through their mobile devices while a few access the internet through other devices such as tablets and desktops. The studies further show that the teenagers spend a lot of time online by interacting with others through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. They are also shown to spend a lot of time online in order to shop and find places to hang out or eat (Lenhart, 2015., Statista, 2016). Fisher et al in their article, ‘Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge’, explain how the internet creates a false sense of intelligence and an inflated notion of one’s capability and knowledge about things. The authors show how access to information is often confused with knowledge and personal understanding of the concept or information.They contend that, “ After using Google to retrieve answers to questions, people seem to believe they came up with these answers on their own; they show an increase in “cognitive self-esteem,” a measure of confidence in one’s own ability to think about and remember information, and predict higher performance on a subsequent trivia quiz to be taken without access to the Internet. These fact-based effects are dependent on the reliability and the familiarity of the search engine, suggesting the processes by which the Internet affects cognition function differently across types of knowledge (Lenhart et al 683).” Kaplan in her Washington Post article, “How the Internet makes you think you’re smarter than you really are”, echoes similar views and gives examples of studies that prove how people inflate their sense of knowledge about something after looking up something on Google. She says, “Accurate personal knowledge is difficult to achieve, and the Internet may be making that task even harder (Kaplan, 2015). Dr. Petro van der Merwe in his article, “Adolescence, Internet Use, Social Adjustment and Emotional Intelligence,” says that, “Since the internet has become an ingrained part of adolescents’ lives due to the proliferation of cellphones thatsynchronise with the internet, which has had the effect of adolescents chatting and sending messages on a nearly constant basis, the learning of emotional skills has become more of a problem (Der Merwe 2328).” He goes on to add that the recent technology has enabled adolescents to literally fire away messages in seconds and that they have reached a point where they fail to make connections in the real world either verbally or in person. The internet is also often accused of evacuating emotions and depersonalising relationships (Staples, 2004). In the book, Next: The Future Just Happened, the author says that the “adolescents see the internet as a transformational device that lets them discard quotidian identities for more glamorous ones (Lewis, 2003).” Many suggest that the internet allows people to be someone else or be anonymous and this is quite attractive to adolescents, especially the ones who are too shy to interact with people in real life. It also leads kids to live a completely different life with little respect for others or knowledge of how their actions might affect others. Even though they might be constantly in touch, they could be emotionally distanced from each other. Sparrow et al conducted a study on adolescents in 2011 to test how expectations of having internet access to gain information at a later time affected their memory and found that these students were less likely to members specifics but were able to remember where to find the information (Sparrow et al, 2011). The internet is also said to cause ADHD , especially in young children and adolescents and seems to aggravate the problem in existing conditions (Dewey, 2015). There are also numerous articles on the internet that suggest that internet could have some positive effect on adolescents such as increase in test scoring, communication and writing skills in addition to knowing more information.
Studies and existing information show that the internet affects adolescents in both positive and negative ways. It leads to the gaining of more knowledge (good and bad), easier accessibility to information, violent and psychotic behavior (result of exposure to violent games, websites and the ability to remain anonymous or as a different person) and an inflation of the level of knowledge they have. The internet, while putting adolescents in constant touch with each other online also drive them apart as they send more time online and not with each other in real life. It is evident that the internet does not lead to increase in actual intelligence. Rather adolescents go for the easy way and look to the internet to find fast answers. Lack of research on a topic and less time spent on learning does not increase their intelligence levels but rather leaves them with a false sense of intelligence. They tend to think that they know more than they actually do as they are easily able to find the information that they need. They fail to realize that finding information online is not equivalent to actually knowing something about a concept or a topic. Flitting between various social media platforms and websites also means that they are not focused on one particular thing at a time. This leads to attention deficiency and they end up not knowing much in detail about a lot of things. Even though they might know about the facts of a certain event they fail to know about what has actually led to the event in the first place. The internet is a new phenomenon that also constantly reinvents itself and changes as new technology comes to the market. Adolescents are mostly the first ones to test a device or a new app. Being able to use new devices, learning about new technology does make them intelligent but that does not alone make a person intelligent. An adolescent needs an overall growth when it comes to being intelligent and the internet does not do it. It only acts as a tool through which the kids can know more. It is too early to learn about the psychological effects of the internet on adolescents as both the internet and the adolescents simultaneously went through a growth curve. However it can be safely said that knowing does not actually equate to being knowledgeable about something.
The internet has a lot of uses for everyone. However parents should be careful about how much time children and adolescents spend online. Although it is used as a learning tool, it can also cause damage to them when they have an unrestricted access to a lot of information. They are susceptible to viewing adult content, engage in gambling and can become bullies as their online identities give them a false sense of safety. Reading a few lines about a concept or a problem also instills in them an illusion or a false notion of being intelligent. It also causes an emotional disconnect in many cases as texts and images the human connect that people get through normal social interactions such as talking over a cup of coffee or meeting in person. The internet is a great place to find out new things, learn about almost everything but it does not mean that it makes a person intelligent. And even though adolescents use it a lot, it does not make them any smarter. They are just well versed in finding out where they could get information. It does not really teach them to sift through the various data, analyze them or apply them properly in real life. A host of factors go together to make a person intelligent and internet is one of the factors where it acts as a source of knowledge.
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