Circling the wagons against Nick Carr

What is it about Nick Carr, a very bright guy, that inspires the not-so-bright guys to bring out the knives? Criticism of his recent Atlantic piece has ranged from the predictably ungenerous to the downright bitchy.

Nick Carr

(Credit: Nick Carr)

So it goes. The chattering class always gets irritated when convention gets challenged. After Carr published his thoughtful Harvard Business Review article in 2003, "Why IT Doesn't Matter," many technology leaders and trade press opinion makers reacted harshly.

They so caricatured Carr's nuanced thesis that they entirely missed his bigger point about IT's declining importance as a competitive asset. In the end, of course, it turned out Carr was quite right.

Now history is repeating. Part of the problem, I suppose, is Carr's headline. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Catchy? I'll say! That headline rates right up there with the New York Post's 1982 gem, "Headless Body in Topless Bar."

But that's just a tease to draw in readers. Carr's real concern is less with Google as the new bogeyman than on how our reliance on the Web might be turning us into multitasking scatterbrains.

He may be onto something, though all we can do at this point is share anecdotes. Apropos, I came across a doozy that speaks to Carr's point.

Former chess champion Josh Waitzkin returned to Columbia University, where he sat in on a class taught by a former professor. The class was taught by Dennis Dalton, who Waitzkin described as "the most important college professor of my life." Here's what followed:

Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!

When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom. Students defend this trend by citing their generation's enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing.

How much blame does the Internet deserve here? What about the effects of too much television, or poor parenting? Maybe all of the above. In his essay, Carr observes that the Internet is projecting its influence in other parts of the culture. For example, the old-media world, anxious not to wind up in history's dustbin, is adopting some of the popular conventions of the Internet. He notes:

As people's minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience's new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the "shortcuts" would give harried readers a quick "taste" of the day's news, sparing them the "less efficient" method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

It's a provocative idea, though even Carr is not entirely certain how far to push it. He acknowledges that any final determination of how Internet use impacts cognition must await extensive neurological and psychological testing. That's as it should be.

Until then, Carr may remain a voice in a snarky wilderness, but at least credit him with initiating a important conversation.

[mrobmsu]

I agree 100%. As a college prof its getting increasingly difficult to ignore the incessant laptop/cellphone "use" in my classes. Students claim they are taking notes, or checking the time, but I am certain that they are engaging in the behaviors Carr cites above--the temptation is just too much.

I know--I do it myself in faculty meetings. ;)

[ssenator]

The recently reported news in Science Daily (10 June 2008) )
"A propensity for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might be beneficial to a group of Kenyan nomads, according to new research..."
could imply that these young students are engaging in a self-filtering exercise which will yield nomadic, information-information surfing consultants as wheat, and those who do not posses those skills as chaff.

[starflyer3000]

While I agree that many students tend to get distracted (I teach high school, so I'm well acquainted with the fickle and easily-distracted teenage mind), I wonder if there really has been any change in people's "distractedness," or if technology is simply being used as an outlet to something that was already there. I know that my mind has always tended to wander a bit, but when I was in school, I didn't have a laptop with Internet-access; instead, I doodled (and still do) almost constantly, even while taking notes.

Also, while I have no doubt that the lecture that the article cites really was extremely interesting, many of us in education have recognized that 75 minutes is way too long for anyone to sit there, even when there's a discussion going on. What really needs to change (this has been happening in secondary ed for a while and is finally filtering up to the college level) is the way class time is used; while a certain amount of lecture and discussion is crucial, students should have more to do than just listen (either to the professor or other students). Regardless, however, I seriously don't think any of this has anything to do with the Internet itself; after all, this is exactly what we heard during the rise of MTV (if we look at this causally, then, perhaps the Internet's scatterbrainedness is actually a result of the MTV-style editing of the 80s than anything else.)

[ghostofitpast]

There are actually two separate threads to pursue here, which may just involved looking at the same technology from two different angles.

First, whether or not Carr actually wrote the headline (which is not necessarily the case), there is at least one way in which GOOGLE is making us stupid! It resides in the way in which Google searches cultivate a view of knowledge as the ability to deliver straightforward answers to straightforward questions. Whether is this a matter of semantic analysis of the question (as, for example, Powerset tries to do) or of being clever enough to home in on the right keywords for Google or Wikipedia, this is a frighteningly impoverished view of knowledge. Our knowledge emerges from our experiences in the life-world, and we do much more in that life-world than ask question for the sake of getting answers. More thoughts at:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/05/playing-with-powerset.html

Second, my guess is that Carr is less concerned about THAT we multitask and more concerned about WHAT gets multitasked. The real danger of the Web is that it feeds our addiction to consumerism to such an extent that our consumerist live now interleaves with everything else we do, even in the classroom or the workplace. This strikes me as the real theme of the Waitzkin anecdote. Thus, it is not that we are scatterbrains but that we have been reduced to self-indulgent infantilism! More thoughts on this one at:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/06/our-greatest-loss-loss-of-balance.html

Finally, it goes without saying that Google is one of the primary technologies through which the Web feed our addiction to consumerism; so both threads are equally critical of Google!

[Lerianis]

I have to disagree totally with this study. Frankly, I am one of the students who they had to give a special exemption to in order to use a computer in the classroom to take notes, and I was never "distracted" by it, either in high school or college.
As to teachers who are 'annoyed by the incessant use of cellphones/computers in their classroom'.... they are the same ones who got annoyed when students didn't pay attention to them because they were reading comic books back in the day.

[destiny_altered]

Cell phone-wifi multitasking is a wonderous means of attaining the goal of our society: rampant, brainless consumerism. It affords multiple opportunities to express the 11th Bill of Rights, the right to be rude. It enables our belief that our problems will be solved either by (1) billions of self-gratifying purchases (republicans) or (2) unfunded, wishful legislative mandates (democrats) all within the timeframe of a TV miniseries. Multitasking fits a society in which intelligence is picking the best of four possible answers (are you smarter than a fifth grader?) or far-ranging memory (jeopardy). Inconsiderate, distracting, and dangerous; multitasking brings us that much closer to death on the highway and materialistic nirvana everywhere else. What's not to like?

[gerrrg]

Don't mistaken multi-tasking for a mind wandering off. 20 years ago, bereft of the internet, one would either nod off or doodle, maybe read a magazine. The point of the article misappropriates common behaviour as something nascent of the internet era. It is not so. And hold on...that scrolling message at the bottom of the screen comes not from influence of the internet; it comes from the stock ticker tape of 100 years ago. Anecdotal evidence be damned! You can find a million opposing opinions on the same subject, based on anecdotal evidence. What value is anecdotal evidence, except to provide wonderful stories that may be passed down?

[aylmerboi]

Carr does a disservice to his argument by emphasizing Google when it is the whole internet culture that is to blame. I am not surprised, and am increasingly convinced, that years of flipping between web pages and spending little time on each would take its toll. I do not use cell phones, but have increasingly struggled with concentration and sitting still for extended periods of time. I believe Carr is ahead of the research on this. Perhaps if children are raised in this environment they can incorporate it into their lives. I am not so lucky to have grown up with this technology.

[jmqwerty]

carr's article needs a double sided response, yes, google does make us stupid in that for some it allows a superficial answer to a question, for others it is just the beginning of a search for information. yes, i use it all the time but it has provided me with much more depth on subjects that i am interested in, google provides a multitude of sources not just what I can phyiscally lay my hands on. I would never have known about these other sources of information had not extensive listings shown up on the google searches. If you use google properly, it is an extremely valuable research tool in addition to a local library collections.

[destiny_altered]

Neither Carr nor Cooper appear to propose the technology is wrong. But it's likely that members of past civilizations were unaware of the changes that brought them down. So far books, rock and roll, and TV have not destroyed western culture. The internet won't either. But, human beings have not physically, mentally or socially evolved beyond hunting and gathering. We delude ourselves by believing we can control all aspects of technology without controlling ourselves. For example, add some ice on the road and we see how far beyond our physical abilities controlling a motor vehicle travelling at 50 or 60 miles an hour becomes outside narrow routine use. We know that everyone else's ability to concentrate while driving while talking (cell phone or not) is as impaired as being legally intoxicated. Driving kills 30,000 Americans a year, but I can talk on the cell phone and drive. At least drunk drivers have an excuse. Acute alcohol intoxication impairs physically and mentally and chronic alcohol use diminishes frontal lobe function - judgment. Every day millions deny that reality, setting themselves up for failure - lethal failure if it's in a car.

So is the internet making us stupid? No, our educational system creates and society encourages unthinking conformity. It is the lack of personal responsiblity to think and act beyond the moment that is harmful. The president of the United States gave us a small tax rebate and we are to believe that a little spending money will solve the problem of increasing international oil demand and (alleged) oil supply decline. And we buy that rationale because we have not trained and disciplined ourselves to think it through. Even now the Yahoo political headline is McCain and Obama on the the economy even though the economy is utterly dependent on oil. A shallow issue for shallow multitasking minds. So who gets elected - the one who proposes the highest tax rebate?

Multitasking distracts. Whether that's driving a car or considering how best to slow oil demand while alternative energy sources are created; neither will be done well. The interent offers an opportunity to interfere with both immediate concentration and complex thought. The internet enables stupidity, allowing us to be distracted from coming together to idenitfy and solve large, complex problems. We make the choice to do so.

[wmfischer]

I've actually been researching for a book, GoogleFried, on this very subject for the past year. And although the neurology is disputed (with some interesting fMRI data pointing towards Carr's thoughts), pervasive search engines have many larger sociological imports including:

Displacing Editors: How Search Algorithms tell you what?s relevant.
The self-reinforcing nature of relevance. The multi-billion dollar ?relevance? business. How companies and individuals ?game? Google. Cheating Wikipedia and other attempts to modify history. What happens to information deemed ?less relevant? and how this impacts our understanding of history and the world around us.

Confirmation Bias ? The Rise of Conspiracy Theories on Steroids
How the traditional gate-keepers of ?knowledge ? are being displaced by algorithms. How sophisticated search tools make it too easy to reinforce personal theories.

Super Cyranos and Sherlocks: How Search Tools even Changes our Sex Lives
How googling ?pick-up? lines and having the ability to feign broad polymathic abilities countered with the democratization of data which brings sophisticated background research tools to the masses will change both our ability to create a new persona or to escape an old one. How Search will change how we identify ourselves, present ourselves, and forever change our relationships. Also the development of virtual worlds.

more at http://blog.workhound.co.uk
bill

[Len Bullard]

Google won't make us stupid. We will make Google stupid.