Nick Carr: Is Google making us stupid?
(Credit: The Atlantic)It's not yet on the Web, but In the the July issue, The Atlantic has an exceptional and provocative article by Nick Carr, asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" It's a riff on Carr's book, The Big Switch (reviewed here), but covers new ground and has me worried. Carr writes:
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable...James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind "is very plastic...The brain...has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions."
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our "intellectual technologies"--the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities--we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
"Excellent!" you say, "Now I'll be able to retrieve an infinite amount of information, like Google." Maybe. Or maybe our ability to retain and process information will continue to dwindle. Remember books? Those were the things we read before e-mail, Web browsing, and Twitter came on the scene.
Speaking of Twitter, am I the only one who views it as further evidence of a soundbite culture that struggles even to think beyond 140-character blips?
We really don't want to think like Google. We don't want to speak like Twitter. We don't want to converse like e-mail. And yet we increasingly do, as the Internet reshapes the world in its image. Carr writes:
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition...The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
Which is why I'm returning to my books. I read a fair amount--the classics, mostly--but generally only when I'm traveling. As Carr points out, I, too, have difficulty reading when my computer beckons with instant gratification. I read each night to my kids before they go to bed, but Carr's article has me thinking that I need to return to doing the same.
Over the weekend, the Asays determined that we're going to have "reading time" each night for an hour before bed. Everyone (except my 5- and 3-year-old) will read for an hour. My kids were already doing this. The change is for me and for my wife. I need to exercise my brain to think again, and not merely process.
Care to join me? Or is the concern overblown?
Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.







IOW, we are making Google stupid. Consider that a company named 'Google' didn't have far to fall.
The internet, technology, Google, et al. are not responsible for the dumbing-down of our society. It's folks like Mr. Carr who support public school systems taking an ever-increasing share of our hard-earned to deliver adults into our society who are taught neither facts nor skills or even critical thinking. They're just propagandized with whatever extremist drivel that's been proclaimed relevant by the self-nominated intelligentsia, like, well, Mr. Carr himself! Funny how it all comes around like that, eh?
If you started having some health issues, it was the middle of the night, and these health issues weren't life threatening... but you were concerned, not knowing what was going on... you lugged out the big 'ol medical book. Hopefully your family had one.
Google merely reflects what we already did, but just in a more physically convenient manner. Now, rather than lugging out a big 'ol book and flipping to the index to look up the keyword in order to find the pages relevant to your inquiry, we just type in our words to generate a similar list. Instead of only finding answers from the few books we might have in our own home, we find answers from millions of sources from all around the world.
To put this into perspective, think about calculators. Before calculators (and slide rules,) you had to know how to manually perform math on paper. When slide rules came out, more complex math could be easily done on a device - you just had to know how to use it. Once calculators came out, everyone forgot how to use slide rules properly. Everyone was still getting the right answer, they just started forgetting how to get to that answer on paper or using a slide rule. So, if anything, calculators have made people "stupid" in that sense. Take away the calculator, and people won't know how to figure out the square root of 5.
So, prior to Google, we needed to know how to find a book on a shelf, how to find information inside of that book, and how to read that information and comprehend it. Once Google entered the picture, this hasn't changed a whole lot. People still need to know how to find the source of information (by properly formulating their query,) they need to know how to read the results, and how to comprehend the information. At best, Google just made people forget about that "index" at the end of most reference books.
What Google HAS done is given us all access to even more information, with the help of the Internet, of course. What would make us "stupid" is if we all started using screen readers, which read the results back to us. Eventually, we'd all forget how to read. Then, if voice commands could be given, we'd all forget how to type.
Even if this does become the case, does it really mean we are becoming "stupid"? Or are we just adapting to the times? Evolving. Should we call ourselves "stupid" because cars made us forget how to walk far distances? Should we call ourselves "stupid" because we have forgotten how to take care of ourselves and rely on doctors? Should we call ourselves "stupid" because we listen to digital music instead of analog music and no longer know how to appreciate sound? Maybe this is the way you think. An alternative way of thinking is that anyone who doesn't know how to adapt is "stupid". Anyone who feels so uncomfortable about changing to live in the new environment is "stupid". Anyone who reverts back to the old ways of doing things is clearly at the back of the pack, too afraid to step out of the cave. Anyone who turns off the computer and reaches for a book, thinking that they are somehow doing something more intelligent, has convinced themselves that information printed out is somehow different than information on a glowing screen. Information is information. How about you become even less "stupid" and put down that high-tech printed book and reach for a stone tablet.
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
And here is Time Magazine's "All Time 100 Novels" list:
http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html
Of course, don't forget the older classics too, such as those available in the Barnes & Noble Classics series.
Before books we had to memorize information told to us. Books enabled us to access that information. We no longer had to memorize said information.
Therefore, books are making us more stupid.
It's all about balance. The internet vs books in libraries vs physical interaction with other people. Don't favor one to the exlusion of all others.
nicky...what can i say...
it seems there are two sort of people.....apple/google kind and microsoft kind....(this is how the world will split...)
and the first just don't get the second and vice versa......
am the first kind .....and i just .....don't get u nick.....any reasoning would be unfruitful to say the least...
Someone needs to add this to his reading list:
Postrel, Virginia: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress
Printed matter got dumbed down first, then TV, and now internet. Or, as journalists might call it: More accessable.
Secondly, I have no way of knowing this but I guess most of the people reading and commenting on the cnet articles are 'grown ups' who have lived in a time when was no internet... where they had to read papers books and think about and guess the answers to idle curiosities as well as deeply disturbing questions. The generation of college students now entering the job market and every generation following them will never know such a world (if they live in a world of ubiquitous computing). We need to be concerned about how their minds will change because they never have to work to find their answers anymore.
I'm not sure where I stand on the issue, but I do think there's something to what T.S. Eliot wrote many years ago:
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
> beyond 140-character blips?
Certainly not: so does Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (interview at http://mhadigital.org/)
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by nvgeek
June 9, 2008 12:32 PM PDT
- I do agree with the author in one sense...
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See all 67 Comments >>When one can't recall, for instance, what band sang the song "Turning Japanese", it's easier to turn to Google, than try and remember using our own brain power. We don't have to think, or exercise our own power of recollection any longer, Google does that for us.