Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Is the Web drowning out your future self?
Every year The Edge organization asks a "world question" and Edge members answer it in short essays. Question 2010 is: How is the Internet changing the way you think?
In a piece called HIJACKING THE FUTURE SELF, Brian Knutson, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Stanford, ponders the ways in which the Internet pulls us away from our future self, with its longer term goals and needs, and feeds the voracious appetites of the present self. We've always had the conflict between now and the future, but the speed of information search (and, I would add, the quantity and diversity of available content) is changing the balance to favor the desires of now. The web, in his view, can be a threat to our future selves. He writes:
This frightening "face-sucking" potential of the Web reminds me of conflicts between present and future selves first noted by ancient Greeks and Buddhists, and poignantly elaborated by philosopher Derek Parfit. Counterintuitively, Parfit considers present and future selves as different people....
...if the present self doesn't feel a connection with the future self, then why forego present gratification for someone else's future kicks? Even assuming that the present self does feel connected to the future self, the only way to sacrifice something good now (e.g., reading celebrity gossip) for something better later (e.g., finishing that term paper) is to slow down enough to appreciate that connection, consider the conflict between present and future rewards, weigh the options, and decide in favor of the best overall course of action. The very speed of the Internet and convenience of Web content accelerates information search to a rate that crowds out reflection, which may bias me towards gratifying the salient but fleeting desires of my present self.
He does note, however, that we are busy developing ways (software, mostly) to interrupt that present-self bias and remind ourselves of our future self.