Really great article in The Atlantic about the internet’s possible impact on our cognitive structures/patterns/modes. The title, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, sounds like the usual whingeing about the internet — how it hurts our spelling, makes us less polite, decreases our capacity for independent thought, makes us less inclinced to memorize epic poetry, etc. But this article is smarter and more relevant on several fronts.
The thread of the article is that the author has noticed that while he has become quite adept at scanning a staggering amount of information and number of articles on the web, he has become less and less able to finish books or even articles. Friends of his have noticed that as well.
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 article, and many of the people cited in it, speak in clear tones of worry that we are losing something, but it avoids being a tedious baby-boomer lament. Instead, it has a nice survey of how we have always lamented new technologies (Socrates worries that texts will undermine memory and deep learning in The Phaedras, Nietszche’s typewriter causes speculation about what his real voice is, people worry that the printing press will make knowledge too cheap).
It goes deeper, though, into how we have always thought about our consciousness and how our consciousness may be shaped, by our technologies. We used to think of our brains as clocks, then machines, now computers . . .
There is a woe to us argument:
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.
This puts me in conflict. My tech side, which abhors tech laments rolls my eyes, but my conspiratorial said “uh-oh.” Then there is a genuinely sad part:
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.”
This upset in ways that upset me: I am no longer even a trailing member of the digital vanguard. (And the fact that I found the article through a sample of the magazine on the Kindle — the device that was going to get me reading again — is not a comfort.)
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