The Is Google Making Us Stoopid? Debate

Nicholas Carr’s column Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic has opened a wonderful disputation that is drawing in great minds from all over the Web. Edge has the blow by blow account of the academic throw-down debate, which centers on the question of how the Internet is affecting the way we think.

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.

As a result, Carr and his peers describe having difficulty reading long articles or books and immersing themselves in complex subjects. It’s a problem I experience regularly when there are a 1,000 articles queued in my RSS feed. Carr uses Tolstoy’s epically boring masterpiece War and Peace and the number of people who still read this book as an admittedly unscientific measure of the effect the Information Age has on our ability to dedicate the concentration on a single work and follow through on it.

A lot of commenters got hung up on the value of reading War and Peace in and of itself. Even Clay Shirky, in arguing that the book is boring and it’s fine that’s nobody wants to read it, obtusely misses the point in order to talk past Carr and go off on his own personal tirade against traditionalism.

People reading War and Peace isn’t what’s at stake here, deep immersion in subject matter is what Carr worries about our culture losing. It’s the threat that people will find themselves incapable of engaging any thoroughly in-depth and expansive topic that cannot be explained in bit-sized portions. Replace War and Peace with Quantum Physics, and the debate point still stands. Does the Information Age scatterbrain us so much that we have lost the concentration required to learn Quantum Physics?

W. Daniel Hillis makes an extremely important point here that helps us keep perspective on the debate, which is to consider the nature of the medium we are discussing:

A better argument might be that we have easier control over the pace and order of book than a video. That is true, but it points about the advantages of other media, such as linked interactive text, over books. Straight lines of thought and presentation can be a useful tool, but they are a constraint, not a unique advantage.

With the devaluation of the book, we are only losing one kind of thought-process, directed linear thought. When I study Quantum Physics in a book, an author controls my attention, directing me through the subject matter along a path they believe best suits understanding for their audience. When I study Quantum Physics online, I create my own path through the subject matter, following hyperlinks to additional background information and clarification as I, the individual, need them.

With web surfing, I am customizing my learning according to my own needs, with books, I am benefiting from the wisdom of someone who has all ready delved deeply into the subject. Both methods of learning are important, and, to quibble with Hillis, both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage of the book is it’s linear-learning constraint, and David Brin raises the chief disadvantage to online learning:

Instead of fretting about specialists “knowing more and more about less and less,” today’s info-glut has had an inverse effect—to spread peoples’ attention so widely that they—in effect—know just a little about a vast range of topics. No longer do we fear “narrowmindedness” as much as “shallowmindedness.”

An example of “narrowmindedness” is a dittohead that consumes eight-plus hours of conservative talk radio a day, or any ideogogue who’s aversion behavior prevents their exposure to a variety of perspectives and opinions. I have faith that the overwhelming majority of people are not narrowminded in general; however, I think that same majority, myself included, is probably overwhelmingly shallowminded.

Shallowmindedness is what gives many of us something to talk about. We get it from magazines, television, movies, and chain e-mails. It’s a way of knowing what everyone else knows, and it’s not synonymous with a lack of intelligence.

On the contrary, this whole debate resembles one in science about whether it is better to be a hedgehog or a fox scientist. Scientists who are foxes dart from topic to topic, absorbing a wide variety of facts, which may or may not prove fruitful on cross-pollination. Hedgehog scientists hunker down in one subject and become and expert in it.

I suppose on the Internet, foxes like me post the daily links to all sorts of stuff to chat about around the water-cooler at work, but it’s the hedgehogs who make those links possible, and without them, the Internet would be a much less interesting place.

Just some food for thought.