Sunday, August 10, 2008EVOLUTIONARY THINKINGI 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. 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. The entire article is recommended at the link above. Comments (6) |
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