SUNDAY, 17 AUGUST 2025

I’m more than old enough to remember the early days of the internet when its advocates breathlessly informed us that it would make a genuinely participatory democracy possible because everyone would have a voice, not just the rich and the powerful and big business and the mass media, and as a consequence a hundred flowers would bloom. A few decades on, as most of those flowers have withered and only the strongest weeds remain and block out the sunlight for the rest, and those former advocates of online freedom queue up to genuflect to our shiny new autocrats in a scramble to get even richer, the promises they made leave a bitter aftertaste as they linger in the mouth.

I think those on the liberal left made the mistake of assuming that it would be able to use the new online media as successfully as it had used the traditional media of press and TV. Whether it was the speeches of King and the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s, the feminist infiltration of Miss World at the start of the 1970s, or lesbians abseiling down the walls of the House of Lords at the end of the 1980s, the mass media lapped up the images and inadvertently spread the word on behalf of the liberal left. Whatever the reason for its failure online since – whether the pendulum was bound to swing back as social liberalism became the norm to be fought against, or the neo-fascist right watched carefully and stole many of the left’s techniques, or the liberals got complacent and busied themselves taking snapshots of their lunches and posting them online while the neo-fascists were using it to influence elections, or there was a naive belief in the good will of commercial opportunists whose only true interest was themselves – there has been a role reversal and it is now the far right which uses the internet and social media much more successfully to spread its disinformation and hatred.

Partly this is due to the power of victimhood as a tactic, one which minorities of all kinds used to very good effect in the heyday of social liberalism. But everyone is a victim now. Ironically, the real victims – refugees fleeing war zones, gay people imprisoned or even executed in many parts of the world because of their sexuality, women who suffer domestic violence, trans people whose personal safety in public spaces is increasingly threatened – are nowadays accused of virtue-signalling while the new victims – for instance, men who have to compete with women to find employment, or bigots who decide which group will be the bogeyman to attack this week  – blubber into their handkerchiefs online: ‘I’m oppressed!’ They use the internet to organise violent protests, such as that at Southport, while claiming that police efforts to prevent and curtail this violence prove that they are victimised by the establishment and their right to free speech is being censored.

However, I don’t want to focus in this essay on the opportunistic hypocrisy of many of the internet pioneers or how social media has enabled the far right to swell in power and influence. I want to concentrate on something more difficult to pin down but which I believe is very real: its negative psychological, cognitive and social influence on us all, right and left, male and female, young and old, rich and poor. Public discourse has become far more shallow and polarised since I was young and a lot of the blame for this rests with social media and the internet.

For example, most of us nowadays have lots of online ‘friends’. The fact that I put the word into quotation marks and feel pretty sure that you’ll understand why I did that shows that we share a feeling that this friendship is lower in quality than the local friendships we used to have before the advent of the net. Clicking ‘like’ to a picture of someone’s lunch is not friendship: it requires the absolute minimum of effort and no commitment at all. Yet, like almost everyone, I do it, at least with people who were daily friends in the past, such as old work colleagues. If I’m honest the main reason I do it is a sense of guilt that I’ve let the friendship slip, but that doesn’t mean I care enough to make an effort to try to get back in regular contact by sending them an e-mail or a private message. I doubt that they would want this, and to be honest in many cases neither would I. So I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I still remain in regular contact with. This drifting away of friendships is partly the result of a world in which most of us are more mobile and move around, although in theory, at least, social media could actually help us to stay in contact. But it seems that the endless distraction of surfing and clicking on links wins out over keeping old friendships alive.

Turning to the influence of modern technology on cognition, I feel pretty sure that it’s worsening the quality of our thinking. Recent research at MIT into the use of ChatGPT by students to write essays, for example, suggests that the level of critical thinking declines the more that AI is used as a tool. Participants were divided into three groups: one was allowed to use ChatGPT to write SAT-type essays, one could use Google search engine only, and one could not use either. Brain activity was recorded by EEG, and by the end of several months, the group using ChatGPT were showing much less brain engagement. There are several caveats to this, of course: the sample size was small, the level of a marker (EEG activity) is assumed to equate to the level of critical thinking, the problems of evaluating critical thinking in the first place, the necessarily subjective appraisals of final essays, and so on. But it seems intuitively plausible that reliance on a system that can lead to copy and paste to create an essay will not improve quality of thought or depth of understanding.

If people use the internet to access news, it is often to glance at a headline or to watch a two-minute video. So we end up knowing a little bit about lots of things that are happening in the world but we don’t read extended articles, so our knowledge remains superficial and what we read mostly confirms what we already believe before we click. What TV was chastised for – the five-second soundbite – has become even more ubiquitous on the net in the form of a link we can click to move on to something else, while at least in the days of TV news most viewers would have stayed to watch what came after the soundbite. Unlike many traditional news sources, there is generally no attempt by sites to aim for neutrality or objectivity – everything positions us in our ideological camp so that advertisers know where to target their money – and that’s where we stay. In addition, the preference for brevity and instant impact leads to an absence of rational argument and its replacement with a series of ‘facts’ (I place the word in quotation marks because of the manifold problems of presenting truly neutral factual information). Sites rarely look at both sides, and this polarisation becomes even more marked as we move away from online news sites to YouTube videos. We hear what we want to hear, which makes us feel good but does nothing to improve our critical thinking and the subsequent quality of public discourse.

I would also personally argue that modern technology is leading to a general decline in our levels of literacy. The Professor of Linguistics, David Crystal, has pointed out that there has been an increase in the amount of writing and reading because of text messaging (although whether this still remains true is uncertain, as technology has moved on and messages are now likely to be recorded speech), but I’d moderate Crystal’s statement by contending that our writing style has become more basic and one-dimensional and much less able to express the subtleties of thought that were once its strongest virtue. For instance, careful writers of the past would have made a decision about whether to place extra information between two commas, two dashes, or two brackets, depending on how much distance they wanted to create between the information and the main sentence, while nowadays most people use an en-dash without thinking. And, at a more fundamental level, no one would once have relied on emojis or a row of exclamation marks to carry their message.

I’m aware that my own style is old-fashioned, with long sentences containing clauses and sub-clauses, but while even I don’t want to read novels where a paragraph lasts a page like the work of Henry James, I genuinely believe there has been a decline in our literary ability and our sensitivity to words and written language. For example, the BBC, the voice of the English middle classes and once self-appointed guardian of its culture and its literacy, has dropped its traditional style if the articles on bbc.com are anything to go by: almost every paragraph is one sentence long and most of these sentences contain two clauses at most. The art of showing logical links through the use of transitions is dying and articles read like a list of half-connected statements rather than a stretch of language with logical cohesion or coherence. In short, the cultural shift from script to video is destroying literary subtlety, precision and flexibility.

Another problem with modern technology and 24-hour media is that they make everything equal in significance. An earthquake that kills thousands, nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan, what an actress decides to wear for the Oscars: everything has the same worth and the same built-in obsolescence. This was always true to some extent of newspapers and TV, but has reached a dizzying pace in a world where a nine-day wonder is more likely to last nine hours. This is the age of the YouTube short, running for less than a minute, and any video which stretches for longer than an hour will attract almost zero clicks. Apparently, paying attention to a subject for more than one hour requires unbelievable powers of concentration for people nowadays; the irony is that this hour is subsequently wasted by flicking from video short to video short in a fix of titillation that is immediately forgotten as soon as we log off, so we end up learning nothing.

I know I’m in danger of sounding like a terrible snob looking down his nose at people who don’t want to listen to a panel of talking heads discussing whether Wittgenstein or Heidegger made the greater contribution to 20^th century philosophy. But my intended focus here is not on the content but rather on the form, and its tendency to extreme brevity. For instance, every week I spend several hours talking in chatrooms and watching videos about Norwich City, including a PinkUn podcast that generally lasts for over an hour. The key thing is that doing this makes me think about the club: which formation we should use in games, which players we should include in the match-day squad, whether we should buy a specific player, and so on. A thirty-second video of a player scoring a winning goal will be pleasurable, for sure, and I might watch it several times to get my dopamine kick, but it won’t teach me anything. So the content in online text or videos doesn’t have to be about the kind of stuff you might learn at university, but it does need to stimulate thought. In contrast, the set-up of the internet seems designed to deaden thought and reduce our attention span and I don’t see how this can lead to anything other than cognitive decline. (And I’m not suggesting for a moment that I’m immune to this; I struggle to focus when I read online much more than when I read a paper book, and there have been plenty of times when I’ve chosen not to click on a video link because I could see that it lasted for ninety minutes.)

I will now move on to more general psychological problems and issues that I suspect can largely be attributed to modern technology, although my thoughts here are much more speculative and based on impressions rather than solid evidence. Basically, I fear that so much time spent on a screen, on the internet and social media, and particularly now on using AI, is undermining our sense of reality and is a major reason for the increase in mental illness among the young. In 1969, King Crimson released their debut album with the opening song, 21^st Century Schizoid Man, and I see this as predictive in terms of what is actually happening in our century, as was the work of people like Szasz and Laing in arguing that neurotic and psychotic forms of mental dissociation were becoming the norm in modern society and it was often the ‘crazy’ who were most sane. (These ideas were also active in popular culture in movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)

Basically we now, more than ever before, live as abstracted minds dissociated from our bodies in a virtual zone where place has become unimportant or even irrelevant. On a crude level, this manifests itself as people walking down the street with their eyes glued to their cellphones, scarcely aware of the reality around them, locked inside the bubble of their brain rather than taking part in the physical environment through which they move. On a global level, it is a situation in which we can stand in an airport or a shopping mall and, except for the language on the signs and the shop fronts, we could be anywhere in the world. I’m generally not a fan of Deleuze and Guattari, mainly because I don’t really understand a lot of what they say and have my suspicions that Sokal was justified in using some of their writing in his infamous hoax, but their concept of deterritorialisation, a disorienting sense of dislocation, an absence of home territory, a randomness of place, seems right on the nail. Something which is essential to biological species if they are to function well – a sense of territory – is being lost and this is driving us towards schizophrenic ways of thinking and experiencing life (although I’m not sure that Deleuze and Guattari saw this as a negative, but rather perhaps as an opportunity to transcend rationality and logic. As I said, I don’t feel I understand them).

This loss of home and territory has huge political repercussions in my opinion. It helps to partly explain the rise of the modern far right, (although not necessarily of its leaders, many of whom are cynically milking people’s sense of unease and resentment to advance their own political or financial agendas.) But the anti-immigrant rhetoric they issue appeals to so many people who are desperately clinging to their national or local roots which they feel are being eroded day by day. At one level we are animals, and animals generally attack when their territory is threatened. Contemporary society seems divided between a privileged, nomadic class which can successfully negotiate this loss of home and pace of change (to which I guess I belong, having lived in nine countries to date), and its native citizens who say things such as ‘it just doesn’t feel like my country any more’. And these two radically different ways of seeing the modern world seem set on a collision course.

Ironically, though, the people who feel left behind are using the very same tools that are fanning the flames of rapid globalisation as they enthusiastically adopt smartphones and the net. More importantly, as they dissolve our sense of familiar space and a territory that is home, these devices, and especially AI, are undermining our inner trust in a stable reality. At the day-to-day level this takes the form of fake news and photoshopping, but we can probably deal with these since they are more of an intensification of something that has always existed rather than a new phenomenon. The truly destructive thing is the sense that we can no longer believe anything we see or hear or are told: a photograph or a video could be fabricated, messages on Facebook or below the line on YouTube could be the work of bots masquerading as human beings, a picture attributed to Van Gogh could turn out to be the work of ChatGPT, a newspaper article about asylum seekers in a Welsh village could have been created by the KGB or the CIA. Marx’s statement that, under capitalism, ‘all that is solid melts into air’, seems amazingly prescient given how long ago it was written. And in my opinion, for all that he is sometimes ridiculed by intellectuals like Rushdie, Baudrillard was essentially right: all there is now, in the virtual world at least, is simulacra.

There is a general agreement, to paraphrase Eliot, that human beings cannot bear too much reality. Dawkins uses this argument to explain why people prefer what he considers to be the superstitious nonsense of religion to the hard, cold truth of modern science. But I would say the converse is also true: human beings cannot bear too much unreality either, and we are moving into a world where nothing is ever true or false, right or wrong, real or unreal, but just the flicker of reflections in a hall of mirrors, and pace claims that this can all be blamed on the wicked theories of postmodernism, I would argue that the deeper cause is the virtualisation of reality stemming from modern technology. The standard of mental health in developed countries is collapsing, especially among children and adolescents, and I suspect that their growing up in a virtual world where anything and everything might be faked is a large part of the reason. They inhabit a world with no solid foundation and the ground is gradually crumbling under their feet.

I’ve sounded like a total Luddite in this essay, so before I end I’d like to balance things at least slightly by pointing out just a few of the ways in which the internet and modern technology is truly miraculous. We take it all for granted because we become habituated so quickly to new situations, but if we stand back for a moment and think about it, especially people like me who grew up in a world where what we have available on a device is beyond the wildest fantasies of the sci-fi in our youth, we are kids in Aladdin’s cave who have rubbed the magic lamp. To use music as just one example, it gives me a cornucopia of options. For instance, this week I’ve been listening to the work of the incomparable Yma Sumac, and last week I heard multiple versions of Satie’s Gnossiennes 1, ranging from traditional interpretations on a piano, versions on cello, glass harp and classical guitar, plus some really kooky variations including a weird Balkanised rendition by a collective called Forgotten Fish Memory Orchestra. Turning to research, which used to involve libraries and microfiche and long, fruitless hours trying to track down some obscure quotation or fact, nowadays when I write my weekly blogs, I have instant access to all of the information I might need: I can check dates and spellings and the accuracy of my memory, plus fill out those areas where my knowledge is sketchy. Meanwhile, in ordinary everyday life, I can find out badminton scores from the Chinese Open and learn how a football team from the third tier of the Portuguese league got on this weekend. Frankly, this wasn’t just unpredicted when I was young – it was unimaginable.

So, as I draw to a close, I’d like to point out how modern technology, although we often focus on negatives such as cyber-bullying and fat-shaming and self-image issues and the dangers of addiction, has so much to offer us if we use it wisely. Rather than harming young people, it can really help those who are shy and find it difficult to communicate with others in real life. It can be a portal to the wider world for the elderly and housebound and the disabled. In short, the potential benefits are enormous. And like every human tool, we can be its slave or its master (I hope this will also prove true of AI after reading gloomy predictions from some of its experts). In political terms, modern technology need not inexorably lead us down the path of xenophobic nationalism; in theory it can make our societies more global and broad-minded and internationalist. Perhaps a lot of the negative consequences we are going through at the moment is our species adapting to a new technology and we will eventually slot it into our lives in the same way we’ve slotted books and newspapers following Gutenberg or the invention of film and radio and TV. If we don’t do this, however, I genuinely fear for our future.