Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr seems to think so
August 9th, 2008 | by emontero |Nicholas Carr’s article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, is a far-reaching piece of reading regardless of your field of study or work:
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Mr. Carr is putting forward the idea that the duration and intensity of our concentration spans have suffered greatly because of the Internet (and the peculiar reading patterns that have emerged because of it):
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
The Google Effect?
The article may seem long for current Internet standards. But trust me on this one: this cake is totally worth the candle.
3 Responses to “Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr seems to think so”
By Eduardo Burgos on Aug 11, 2008 | Reply
It’s ok with internet. But why google?
By emontero on Aug 11, 2008 | Reply
@Eduardo,
I think Carr is leveraging Google’s ubiquitous presence to forcefully convey his message. Think about it for just a second. What company is synonymous with Internet? What is the first name that comes to your mind when someone utters the word Internet? Internet… Search… Google!
Furthermore, did you read Eric’s (Schmidt) words in the article about artificial intelligence? I think the notion that intelligence is just amassing and indexing huge amounts of data seems rather simplistic. Therein lies the reason I agree with Carr:
“Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.”
By Eduardo Burgos on Aug 16, 2008 | Reply
Hehehe, nah that’s too much. At least I think the human brain is by far more “heuristic”, which makes us better in a lot of aspects.
But still the guy mentions internet and blames google