[Publib] "Is Google making us stupid?"

[Joe Schallan]

If you care about the relationship of reading to thought, you'll want to read Nicholas Carr's article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," in the July/August issue of The Atlantic (also available online at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google ).

Here's an excerpt:

"Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure."

Carr's premise is that the way the net frames information, presents it, and makes it searchable is altering our thought processes -- toward less attention, less deep thought, and less understanding:

"Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. 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."

As custodians of the book (though some of us would vehemently deny that such custody is now the most important part of our work), librarians nurture deep reading . . . and deep thinking.

And yet much of what we now promote in our libraries seems to consist of the very things that make war on attention, reading, and thought.

Yes, we are giving them what they want, but I feel like a dope peddler instead of a librarian.

What the hell are we doing?

- - - - - -

So much scorn is being heaped upon Mr. Carr as the result of the article that CNET's Charles Cooper has taken note:

http://tinyurl.com/4o7oz7

Is the net, then, just a medium, or is its nature reprogramming the way we think? And if it is, then what are the implications of the loss of long-form journalism, long-form reading, and long attention?


-- Joe Schallan
   Phoenix