The Question Is: Is Google Changing What It Means to be Smart?
Will Richardson brought my attention to Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr poses the question: Is the internet re-wiring our brains? Noting that he and many of his friends can no longer concentrate deeply as they read for extended periods, Carr asks if the way we think is being shaped by this new medium of hyperlinks and infoglut. Obviously skeptical about the internet as a positive force in the evolution of our culture, Carr nevertheless makes some good points and raises some very valid concerns. I have two specific problems with his article, however:
1. I think his characterization of Google as the embodiment of Taylor’s principles of scientific management is way off:
In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
This is the company that tells its engineers to spend 20% of their time working on projects of their choosing not directly related to their core job function. They manipulate their corporate logo to commemorate significant dates in the progress of the arts and science. There’s a lot about Google that scares me; but I think that overall their corporate culture is one that celebrates non-linear thinking and creativity. In the same way that so many viewed the IBM of the 50’s and 60’s as a monolithic culture of conformity and order (in spite of their “Think” motto), I think Carr mis-characterizes Google’s attempt to make information manageable in the service of free thought as an attempt to mechanize thought.
2. I have to assume that an editor titled the piece. I say this because in spite of all of his concerns about how the Internet is changing the way we think, Carr is very honest about his abivalence. He opens his conclusion noting, “Maybe I’m just a worrywort.” And while he offers a very convincing argument that the internet is changing how we process information, I don’t think he ever goes so far as to equate that new way of thinking with “stupidity.” Regardless of whether it is Carr or his editor who is to blame, I think we have to stop and consider not only what we have lost, but what we have gained. If we do indeed “think in hyperlinks,” then perhaps we are developing a new capacity to draw connections between disparate ideas, people, and works. Perhaps the structure of the internet reflects the way our culture has evovled into a postmodern one characterized by diversity and interconnectedness and if our brains our evolving in the same direction, they will serve us all the better in this new world.
Carr shows that clearly the notion of what terms like “literacy” and “intelligence” is changing. Will we stand by and let others define what’s important or will we play a role in re-interpreting these concepts?
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