I was reminded of an this article I’ve been meaning to read for a long time and finally took the time to read. Here is the title and information in wonderful, library-approved style:
Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, August 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.
I wanted to read this article and then offer a series of reflections – both on the substance of Carr’s writing and from my own personal experience – that would respond to the questions he raises.
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.
Carr wrote this in 2008 – I think it is safe to conclude that the rate at which the internet has subsumed other intellectual technologies has only increased since then. This seems plainly true – technology in general and the internet in particular have replaced old forms of intellectual technologies. However, the conclusions that Carr draws from this fact deserve some scrutiny.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created 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 all the 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.
I’ve added emphasis to point out what I see as a troubled conclusion. It is troubled in a number of ways. First, in his hypothetical example, a new e-mail message may announce its arrival in that way; in my use of technology that is a preference that the user has sole control over – it is up to the user to make that decision themselves. Second, what is the logical relation between this pop-up message and the users’s attention and concentration? Carr writes merely “the result is” which seems noticeably weak given his tone elsewhere. I would argue that these two flaws – viewing the use of technology as inevitable and not as a set of user choices and the muddled relationship between technological change and user response – are the flaws to his argument.
Two critiques of my own critiques. First, I’m not saying that Carr is wrong is in his assertions regarding technology and the human mind. I’m merely saying I’m not convinced. Second,
This puts me in an uneasy place. Though I at least partially reject Carr’s premise, I find myself agreeing with many of his conclusions. For example,
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.
I can agree with this wholeheartedly. My response, however, is different. Rather than see this loss of “quiet space” as an inevitable consequence of the technological age, I see it as a consequence of remarkably poor user behavior. The task in the digital area is to understand the far reaching of effects of technology (which I believe represent a fundamental paradigm shift in libraries and the broader world) and then to adopt behavioral patterns to those norms.
This post has taken a very abstract approach to this question – but the whole time I was thinking of the smartphone I now carry with me everywhere I go. In Carr’s words, it has very much become my “map and clock, printing press and typewriter, calculator and telephone, and radio and TV” and, to be honest, I couldn’t be happier with that. However, there are many times when I simply turn off my phone, leave messages unchecked, and enter the “quiet spaces” Carr mentions later. At least in my mind, my smartphone use does not destroy the “quiet spaces” of life and both offer essential and exciting parts of the human experience in the 21st century.