For decades the debate has raged: Is technology making us smarter or dumber? The arrival of search engines like Google and Yahoo has only heightened the debate. What is the impact of instant information in an age of instant gratification? While the Luddites have long taken the dark side of this debate, there is now a growing body of evidence among the Net's most avid users that things are not "looking up" while we spend more and more time "looking up stuff" on the Web. Nicholas Carr offers his take on this and, if he's correct, it doesn't portend good things for either reading or intellectual thought. The following is condensed from his Atlantic Monthly article of July/August 2008.
What
the Internet is doing to our brains
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
By Nicholas Carr
The
Atlantic Monthly,
pp. 56-63,
July-August 2008
or more
than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of
time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding
to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been
a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required
days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can
now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick
clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale
fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m
not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging
in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing
e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching
videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from
link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re
sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point
to related works; they propel you toward them.)
“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
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. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
necdotes alone
don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term
neurological and psychological experiments that will
provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects
cognition. But a recently published study of online research
habits, conducted by scholars from University
College London, suggests that we may well be
in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
As part of the five-year research program, the scholars
examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors
to two popular research sites, one operated by the British
Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that
provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other
sources of written information. They found that people
using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping
from one source to another and rarely returning to any
source they’d already visited. They typically read
no more than one or two pages of an article or book before
they would “bounce” out to another site.
Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s
no evidence that they ever went back and actually read
it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
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.
The
idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing
machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet,
it is the network’s reigning business model as
well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more
links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities
Google and other companies gain to collect information
about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors
of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in
collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit
from link to link—the more crumbs, the better.
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely
reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in
their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, “we risk turning into ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
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DIRECTORY: articles on the good, the bad, and the ugly of reading online.
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