tdistler.com

Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” has some good insights (though I think his fears are unfounded). He discusses how new technologies don’t only change the way we work, but also the way we think. He worries that the Internet is causing us to think less, as we now rely on the instant access to information. This is the same argument people made years ago about the use of calculators… they signaled the demise of mathematical education as we know it. That turned out not to be the case, because the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks. The same thing is true about the Internet… yes, we don’t have to retain as much information in our heads, but it allows us to broaden our knowledge far beyond anything that was possible before. Mike Masnick at TechDirt expands on this a little.

Here are some excerpts from “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“… the full article is still worth the read:

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

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.

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.