FILMMAKER BLOG  Sunday, August 10, 2008
EVOLUTIONARY THINKING
I just caught up with Nicholas Carr's thoughtful and resonant "Is Google Making Us Stupid" in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. His initial description of a new kind of malady will strike a chord with many who spend a good deal of time on the 'net: 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.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. Carr's piece goes on to talk about how changes in thinking, our concept of time, and our conceptualization of ourselves are prompted by changes in information technology, from the Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century to the search engine of today. Along the way he draws on Kubrick, Nietzsche, Socrates and Richard Foreman and also includes these provocative paragraphs on how the internet is transforming traditional media like newspapers, TV, and, yes, the movies. The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules. The entire article is recommended at the link above.
Comments (8)
So on which paragraph of Carr's article did your attention start to flag?
In all seriousness, though, this is a terrific bit of ancillary reading to one of the texts quoted in its body - Proust And The Squid, which I just picked up recently. It's a really fascinating expose on how our brains both process information and read between the lines - a treatise on the chemistry of poetics. Highly recommended.
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posted by David Lowery @ 8/10/2008 10:03 PM
I would argue the opposite. For me, at least. I do much more reading now that I'm online. I'm reading all day. I never liked reading books in the first place.
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posted by @ 8/11/2008 12:39 AM
I don't think he's arguing that people are reading less but that people are reading in different ways and experiencing the act of reading in different ways.
To David, yes, after reading this I want to go out and get that book. And, amazingly, I made it to the end of the article without checking email or clicking for an update on South Ossetia.
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posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/11/2008 1:23 AM
Information gathering is becoming more of a social endeavor via the net. This is exciting to me. We are learning more from our fellow man and yearn for greater knowledge like never before through technology. Professor Michael Jackson had an interesting post regarding the subject of becoming "Mental Grasshoppers." http://tinyurl.com/6esym3 I believe though, we are adjusting our input capabilities at much higher rates due to the ease of knowledge acquisition. I like happy endings so this is my hope.
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posted by Michael Sean Wright @ 8/11/2008 1:43 AM
My point was that because of the internet, people like myself, who normally never read much before, are now reading constantly. The manner in which people read or think might be changing, but at the same time, I'd argue more people are actually reading now than before.
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posted by @ 8/11/2008 11:52 AM
Anonymous, Carr notes, "Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice."
Did you read the whole article, Anonymous?
His point is that the internet has driven us to read in a different, perhaps less patient, way. It's a deeper matter than simply getting a lot of people to read.
I mean, it's good you're reading more now, but that's not his point. You would know that if you'd read the article more carefully.
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posted by @ 8/12/2008 5:40 PM
Oh, I never even looked at his article. I'm sure it's fine. I based my comment off of the above post.
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posted by @ 8/13/2008 1:27 AM
Oh, and one other thing John M, if you read my second post properly, I didn't say people read more -- I said, more people are reading. Notice the difference.
Before you criticize somebody for not reading something, make sure you've read what they've written properly.
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posted by @ 8/13/2008 1:32 AM
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