Adamus.nl
Life, technology, the internet, gaming, politics, and the rest
Is Google Making Us Stoopid?
Author: Adamus19 Aug
A while ago I read an article from Nicholas Carr titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid“, and I thought he brought up a good point.
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 too have been experiencing greater difficulty with concentrating for long stretches of time, and I’m more easily distracted. I now prefer my information in small bite-sized chunks, going for quick summaries instead of the full depth of the content.
But Carr has his critics, among them such technological luminaries as Kevin Kelly:
Carr is a self-admitted worrywart, who joins a long line of historical worrywarts worrying that new technologies are making us stupid. In fact Carr does such a fine job of rounding up great examples of ancient worrywarts getting it all wrong, it’s hard to take his own worry seriously.
Kelly however fails to provide a solid counterargument against Carr’s case, save for pointing at previous technology’s critics and how wrong they all were. Not a very convincing argument.
As someone who’s made a career our of the things the Internet does, I should be exclaiming the online world’s manifold virtues and limitless possibilities. And often I do.
But I’m also worried about what the Internet is doing to us, both as individuals and as a society. It’s not all good, and I think we need to be honest about that. Regardless of how much we’d like to see the Internet as the solution to our global problems, we must face the fact that the online realm creates new problems of its own.
8 Responses for "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?"
And in other news, eating an “all jellybeans, all the time” diet will make you fat and malnourished, and making sure that everyone has plenty of jellybeans on hand at every hour of the day will tend to cause them to eat more jellybeans. Where’s the story here? This is news?
Blaming Google is really pretty stupid itself. (Full disclosure, though: I haven’t actually read any of your links.) There are other problems at work in society: increasingly pervasive media garbage; a collapsing economic, cultural, and ecological environment; schools that have been getting progressivly worse and trying to compensate with increasingly-idiotic standardized tests and pharmaceuticals; added generations of kids raised by parents who were not themselves raised by anyone with a clue how to do so; and so on. When I was a lad, the grown-ups were whining about “the microwave generation” and already making it painfully obvious that they really didn’t know what they were doing.
I don’t think the internet is exactly causing these sorts of problems, at least not in the sense I get the impression you’re talking about. Internet sociology seems to be more a sort of lowest-common-denominator extension of meatspace sociology at this point, and there’s obviously some feedback there, but is it possible that having difficulty concentrating for long and looking for bite-sized infobites is at least in part due to the stress of dealing with increasing real-world time pressures and a mass media that itself focuses on soundbites? Also, boredom?
Good point, frank. Though I’ve been a consumer of media ever since I started watching cartoons on TV at age 3, and my difficulties with concentrating for long stretches of time didn’t become so urgent until recently.
It’s not exactly Google that is being blamed here. Google is just an exponent of the trends of media consumption on the Internet and, agreed, in general. The difference is that watching TV and listening to 3-minute songs are examples of passive media consumption.
Browsing the web is an activity. It involves more brainpower than watching TV. And by surfing the web and consuming these little short segments of information, you’re training your brain more thoroughly to behave in that way than any amount of passive consumption can.
Only in the sense that it’s arguably more interactive to poo nuggets of idiocy into a discussion board or social notworking site than to click the channel-changer button on your television remote or to make a dash for the bathroom/fridge during an advertising break.
Also, you’re not exactly conducting a controlled experiment here - have you considered the possibility that “getting older” may play some role here, as might the simple effect of stress, sleep deprivation, not really being interested in what you’re trying to focus on, and whatnot?
And I’m not so sure that a steady diet of bite-sized, pre-digested tidbits of dumbed-down newsbites and intrusive ads designed to break the human brain isn’t just as much “training” as Googling for Whackypedia entries. What about the way schools (which still laughably purport to be about “education”) are run these days. Oh, and have you noticed that, around here at least, newspaper “paragraphs” have been more like “sentences, and dumbed-down ones at that” for a really long time now? Are you seriously contending that a steady diet of Stupid, force-fed to you if you don’t like it to begin with, doesn’t have some effect? If you want something that requires more focus, you’ll have to seek it out yourself, and probably overcome the aversion-therapy you absorbed to it in school, to boot.
Finally, it seems to me that becoming an easily-distracted idiot is hardly a maladaptation to modern society. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Y’know, one other thing you may not be considering is the powerfully corrosive effect of advertising. Advertising is, after all, carefully designed to corrupt, if not outright destroy, any sort of actual rational thought processes - particularly including the inducement of highly impulsive and irresponsible behaviour. It’s gotten more sophisticated, more intrusive, and more prevalent over the years. Imagine, if you will, regularly adding more and more hydrofluoric acid to your drinking water. And note that the human brain is piss-poor at doing any sort of realistic filtration of input.
Obviously, you can (and should) use adblocking and other content-filtering software on the web. The best thing about Firefox is really AdBlock, NoScript, and FlashBlock; you can accomplish similar things in Opera, and with xLinks2 if you’re clever with a local proxy-server and hosts-file (a trick which presumably could even work in Internet Explorer). But those are imperfect solutions against the sheer quantity of commercial lunacy online, and in any event nothing even remotely like that exists in meatspace. CONSUME, CITIZEN!
I figure the advertisers likely have a greater role in making you stupid than Google does.
I think the internet does create its own problems but that is the same with any thing you do in life. Any new technology, relationship, activity, whatever it is that is new to just you or to society as a whole creates new problems.
One of the keys is to weigh the good and bad, generally when you do this you either resume doing that new activity if the good outweighs the bad or you stop. Same with new things like the internet, if the good outweighs the bad its succeeds, if not it fails.
[...] new article on Wired titled Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains is once again making the case that our growing exposure to bite-sized chunks of information, be it from TV, the [...]
[...] Though people may argue that having such tempting access to vast oceans of random things on the Internet, I do not think that people can blame the Internet for their own lack of focus, concentration, or contemplation. [...]
[...] been eagerly emphasizing the point sceptics and scholars such as Nicholas Carr have been making: that the [...]
Leave a reply