[Publib] "Is Google making us stupid?"

[Marianne Follis]

Well, contrary to the author's message that we have lost the ability to
read for more than a minute or two, I read the article and have to
wonder:  Does thinking, reading and processing information differently
necessarily mean that we are becoming stupid?

You could argue that even if we are not delving as deeply into
information, aren't we encountering more of it?  

Marianne 


-----Original Message-----
From: publib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:publib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Joe Schallan
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2008 6:17 PM
To: Publib
Subject: [Publib] "Is Google making us stupid?"

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










      


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