Socrates worried about the advent of writing, fearing it would make stupid people appear brighter than they were. Turns out he was right. And now Google may very well be doing the same thing.
If you haven't read Nicholas Carr's article on Google, and the internet in general, in this month's The Atlantic, you should. That is, if you can concentrate long enough:
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Pretty frightening stuff, if you manage to make it through the paragraph without clicking to another window, or checking your email.
Although the article could use a little more focus—is he talking about Google, the internet, or are both interchangeable now?—it's spot on in with the concerns it raises. At least if my life is any indication. I pick up a book, and within minutes am wondering if any of those other books on my long-neglected bookshelf are worth reading. When I read non-fiction, I wonder where the links are—what if I want to find out more? What if someone else has blogged about it—couldn't I read the blog post and get all the salient points in a fraction of the time?
And blogging adds another dimension to internet haze. I see something mildly interesting: Should I blog about that? If so, what should I say? Which of my readers might be interested in my thoughts on the fledgling birds outside my window, or the funny thing my daughter said? Or the new song I heard on the radio? (See? I do still pay attention to other forms of media!)
Unfortunately—or fortunately, if you're the victim of a brain injury—our brains keep changing throughout our lives, and brains that have been exposed to hours upon hours of internet surfing are different from brains that haven't. "We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works," Carr writes. Those people worried about wifi in schools should worry instead about what the internet itself is doing to children's brains.
The term "data smog" was coined in 1997, long before Google earned its inventors billions. (Did you click that link? Betcha you wanted to!) Imagine how much worse it is now—with 20 billion webpages out there. (Yes, I got that number by Googling.) The first thing I do in the morning is surf the web, to find out what new pages were added the night before. And sometime during the day, I blurt out at least one tidbit I've learned on the internet.
Socrates, I suspect, would have a fit.
If you've read this far without checking email, you're probably not sufficiently Googled up. Perhaps you should keep it that way.
