There's an interesting (and maybe controversial) article in Atlantic Magazine: is Google making us stupid.
In it, Nicholas Carr suggests the way we gather and read information on line is undermining our ability to 'deep read'; to fully engage with a text, properly understanding, analysing and critiquing it, with the level of intellectual involvement this suggests. Instead, the internet has made us grazers of information, flitting hither and thither looking for facts and soundbites, where anything longer than this post (which may, in fact, be too long) is deemed too much like hard work.
Interestingly, Slate has just made a similar point with its (ironic) commentary on Jakob Nielsen's recent recommendations for optimising on-line reading.
"You're probably going to read this.
It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.
To really get your attention, I should write like this:
- Bulleted list
- Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
- Short sentence fragments Explanatory subheads
- No puns
- Did I mention lists?..."
Now, Carr admits that any nay sayers writing at a time of technological change tend to overstate the negatives (and the frequency with which they happen), and underestimate the emerging positives. Socrates bemoaned the emergence of writing after all, fearing it would become a substitute for head knowledge, and that people would "cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful". The development of the printing press was similarly criticised for making books readily available, with the prospect of intellectual laziness and a weakening of minds. Obviously, whilst maybe containing a grain of truth, the eventual upsides far out-weighted these fears.
But Carr argues that the current shift is significantly different, and that we are losing something important along the way which we will not regain (with societies and individuals being all the poorer as a consequence).
Now this may all be so much intelligentsia angst, albeit angst that I have some sympathy with. The example of how Nietzsche's writing (and thought processes) changed when he shifted from 'considered' hand writing to typing make for an interesting example, for instance...
"One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. 'Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom', the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his 'thoughts in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper'. 'You are right', Nietzsche replied, 'our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts'. Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose 'changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style'."
But a second example of how technological shift has changed us maybe points to a different interpretation of the impact Googlisation will have on people.
The advent of measured time was a paradigm shift, the effects of which we are still feeling today. And there's no denying how positive this has been in many different ways - I wouldn't have caught my train this morning otherwise! But by imposing such rigid structure to our lives, we have also lost something that I am acutely and very personally aware of. Which is why the following resonated so much...
"The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock 'disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences'.The 'abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought'.
"The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments 'remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality'. In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock".
So when we consider the question of whether Google is making us stupid, we shouldn't forget that our brains aren't actualy wired for writing and reading; they are wired for observing and telling; wired for that more instinctive, pre-time world.
Maybe then, and as we might also be seeing in other areas of our lives, the internet isn't making us stupid. Maybe, instead, it is simply moving us beyond the (often beneficial) constraints of our organised, systemised and explicitly rational 'modern' world, (back) to a more instinctive way of being that we are actually better suited for, hunting information on the internet plains as our distant ancesters once did with woolly mamoths (possibly!)
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