Friday, July 11, 2008

Is Google Making Us Stoopid?: A proof of concept?

I was in Starbucks today reading about the 1936 Iraqi coup d'etat when an older guy stopped on his way to a nearby table where his daughter was waiting and stared at, I thought, my feet. After a moment's pause, he continued. Then he stopped again and looked back. After a few more beats, he continued to the table. I was self-conciously checking my shoes for unnoticed dog crap or anti-american graffiti or something that would explain a member of the greatest generation's attention. I was drawing a blank and was heading towards an undignified smell-check when he started to say something to his daughter but was interupted by the barista calling him back for his drink. Uncharacterstically patient, I decided to wait for him to come back, hoping he would explain what was wrong with my feet.

When he did come back, he pointed back towards my table and then asked his daughter if she had seen it. As I shifted my feet underneath my chair to avoid further scrutiny, he told her that it was article about whether google was making us stupid. I had the Atlantic on my table and the cover article this month is Nicholas Carr's Is Google Making Us Stoopid? which is followed in smaller print by What the Internet is doing to our brains. It's a well-written and interesting article that voices the author's concerns about the effects of internet usage on the way that we think, particularly in terms of our ability to focus on topics for long periods of time and think deeply about ideas. Mr. Carr worries that the pre-dominance of quick one to two paragraph articles and blog entries have made us incapable of reading longer form work, preferring instead to scan a few paragraphs for information. He means not only that we are no longer able to read books like Gravity's Rainbow (which is a problem I can attest to) but are also incapable of reading longer form articles, ironic, I thought, to deliver such a message in an article weighing in at just over five pages. While I thought the argument was mostly alarmist and even Mr. Carr, himself, admits that he could just be a modern version of those who decried the printing press, I think there is some basis for his concern that is for me best illustrated by the state of cable news and the decline of the newspaper.

I had to wonder though, as the man after explaining the title of an article of which he probably had never even noticed the subtext, went on to argue that the article was baseless. "Does the encyclopedia make me stupid?", he countered.