The Cognitive Ecology of the Internet

In this chapter, we analyze the relationships between the Internet and its users in terms of situated cognition theory. We first argue that the Internet is a new kind of cognitive ecology, providing almost constant access to a vast amount of digital information that is increasingly more integrated into our cognitive routines. We then briefly introduce situated cognition theory and its species of embedded, embodied, extended, distributed and collective cognition. Having thus set the stage, we begin by taking an embedded cognition view and analyze how the Internet aids certain cognitive tasks. After that, we conceptualize how the Internet enables new kinds of embodied interaction, extends certain aspects of our embodiment, and examine how wearable technologies that monitor physiological, behavioral and contextual states transform the embodied self. On the basis of the degree of cognitive integration between a user and Internet resource, we then look at how and when the Internet extends our cognitive processes. We end this chapter with a discussion of distributed and collective cognition as facilitated by the Internet. Paul Smart Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom. e-mail: [email protected] Richard Heersmink Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. e-mail: [email protected] Robert W. Clowes Instituto de Filosofia da Nova, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Av. de Berna, 26-4° piso, 1069-061 Lisbon, Portugal. e-mail: [email protected] 1 Smart, P. R., Heersmink, R., & Clowes, R. W. (2017) The Cognitive Ecology of the Internet In S. J. Cowley & F. Vallée-Tourangeau (Eds.), Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity and Human Artifice (2nd ed.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland. 2 Paul Smart, Richard Heersmink, and Robert Clowes