Tracey Barnett: Online threat to creativity

I'm pretty sure my 12-year-old son is becoming Santino, the stone-throwing chimp at a Swedish zoo. I see this as a good thing.

The ape made news recently when scientists marvelled that Santino was stockpiling stones to hurl at crowds during opening hours. Sharp as sticks, scientists proclaimed this proves apes have the cognitive ability to plan ahead.

But any schlub who read that story knew what was really going on. The poor chimp just needs the world out of his face sometimes. Santino has been arming himself since 1997.

Enter my son, born the same year Santino started his stone hurling. When my offspring comes home from school, we grunt in acknowledgement. He seeks food, retrieves it, then retreats to a comfort area of his cage with the most powerful weapon he can find, a book.

For maybe 20 minutes or more, he is singularly focused - no outside world, except that story he's crawled into. He's accomplished what poor Santino cannot, "sensory cocooning", as technology researcher Jan Chipchase calls it.

As a maternal primate, I know instinctively not to take my life in my hands and cross that book/food force field. Because I realise that when his zoo is in opening hours, it looks nothing like what I grew up with.

Case in point, scene two; one evening I see my young primate in front of the computer. Two chat room screens are open, plus a live video feed of his friend in the upper right hand corner, who is also looking away into the distance. They are both watching Peter Jackson's King Kong on the television across the room in their respective homes.

Simultaneously, he was juggling three different online conversations, typing away to a half dozen friends, connected by video with another mate, and watching a broadcast movie. This was for relaxation.

Like a Tokyo streetscape that has competing messages on every square inch of building, Chipchase might deem this "napalm for the senses". I'm more afraid it's napalm for creativity.

What is left over when there is such a barrage of input? Who is teaching us how to compete for mental green space so we can hear our own voices?

Our online attention span is more like fleaspan, with "sticky" site visits averaging less than 60 seconds.

I flit from screen to screen because I still want the whole damned candy store open in front of my face. I can't stand the untapped possibilities I haven't yet discovered. But my biggest fear is that my son's generation will do its flitting because he doesn't know anything else, depth and prolonged focus having lost societal value.

When Nicolas Carr asked in Atlantic Magazine, "Is Google making us stupid?" criticism to his article fell into two camps. Some felt the loss of the ability to concentrate, and that being contemplative simply wasn't happening. Others argued that, if so, we still gain much more than we lose.

Both camps may be missing the point. The bigger question is, how is this changing the minds of our next generation? Our online behaviour may be changing the way our brains think.

Researchers at UCLA measured brain activity of two groups. The first that had little web surfing experience showed brain patterns stronger in language, memory and visual centres of the brain, similar to patterns when reading.

A second group of experienced web users had more activity in decision-making areas at the front of the brain. After only five days of web use, the inexperienced group's brains began to match the activity of the more experienced web users.

Carr says the good news is that if you're older, the net may help keep you mentally sharp. The bad news is that this decision-making function consumes other mental resources, leaving less available for other kinds of thinking.

Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life wrote, "People don't understand that attention is a finite resource, like money."

Our greatest challenge may be to teach the next generation how to invest their cognitive cash. That ability will define who we become. I figure as long as my caged one picks up novels instead of stones, the world will be better for it.

Santino however, was castrated last fall to decrease his agitation. I'd bet someone must have given him a Twitter account. If you want to peek further into the future, try the excellent Auckland Writers & Readers Festival today and tomorrow, particularly Sunday's 4pm session on The Next 100 Years.

Information is at www.writersfestival.co.nz and www.traceybarnett.co.nz