Is Google Making Us Stupid? Essay Example

Nicholas Carr’s essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” examines sweeping technological changes in society and the effect these changes have on individuals.  His thesis is that each technological progression of society changes the manner in which the human brain works and changes the physical properties of the brain, i.e. growing neuron connections while deleting others.  Thus, the change from oral history to written history changed the manner in which individuals perceived communication, the change from biological time to mechanical time changed the manner in which individuals perceived time, and the change from written communication to electronic communication is having an impact on how individuals’ brains process information.  While Carr admits that each technological change has both negative and positive effects, he presents the progression from print media to electronic media in a particularly negative light.  Carr’s claim is not very inventive or well-argued.  A much better statement of this claim is found in Sven Birkert’s essay, “Into the Electronic Millennium,” which states that “transitions such as the one from print to electronic media do not take place without rippling–more likely, reweaving–the whole of the social and cultural web.”  More interestingly, Birkert’s essay was published in 1991 and pre-dates the rapid rise of electronic communication.  It is prescient in its analysis, a quality missing from Carr’s work.  But, all objections aside, to boil down the claim of Carr’s article, electronic media have altered the manner in which individuals’ minds examine, analyze, and concentrate on the content and arguments of said media by causing the individual’s attention to divide between multiple messages and paths.

Electronic media of various sorts have divided the attention of the reader and resulted in an electronically induced attention-deficit disorder.  As Carr confesses, “I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.”  Because of electronic media, individuals are no longer mentally able to concentrate on a large chunk of complex text.  In my own experience, Facebook provides a perfect example.  I maintain a Facebook profile.  The amount of material on my profile, both of my own origination and that of my friends, is likely enough to constitute several books.  Because I manage this profile, continually updating it with the often inane events of my life, and allow my friends to send content about the events of their lives, my Facebook has an overwhelming amount of information.  Mentally, the only way to manage this information is to break it into small chunks of information that I can quickly scan, ignore, organize, and digest.  The process that I apply to managing my Facebook profile has become such an ingrained routine that it has penetrated the ways in which my mind processes information.  When presented with a long book or article, I immediately turn to the back of the book or search for the abstract of the article.  When conducting research, I pull articles from databases and often read no further than the short summary provided with the full text.  I find it difficult to concentrate long enough to engage fully with a lengthy text.  My brain has started to apply the routine of information management from Facebook to all scenarios involving information management.  My brain has definitely changed, but I believe that the reason that it has is not solely because of electronic media but because of the massive amount of information that I am called upon to process daily.

Electronic media have changed not only how the reader’s attention focuses but also how the reader becomes a writer.  Carr argues that technology forces the reader, and the experienced writer, into a different manner of writing based on influence of the medium.  He quotes the German scholar Kittler on Nietzsche’s writing after moving from pen and paper to typewriter: Nietzsche’s writing “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”  In my own experience, my Facebook profile has forced a change in my writing.  Facebook, by the manner in which it was designed, calls for brevity and intense focus in writing.  A post on the wall must communicate its message within a very limited number of characters.  Additionally, though the Facebook profile is full of information, few people, including myself, delve any further than the posts on the feed on the main page.  When writing on Facebook, I write almost like a journalist, leading with my most important fact or event and then getting into any details.  The manner in which I write for my profile has begun to influence all my other writing as well.  It has changed my brain.  I now find it very difficult to write long sentences that develop into complex ideas.  Instead, I find myself reaching for the headline or the tagline.  This effect has spilled into my academic writing.  Though I have been taught to vary my sentence types and constructions, I find myself writing simple sentences that are essentially a summary of my important points.  I have become more like Nietzsche in that my writing has changed from complex to simple in structure.

Furthering his argument, Carr asserts that electronic media interrupts “our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”  Readers of electronic media lose the ability to analyze and interpret.  This effect constitutes the core of Birkert’s similar essay on the topic.  The process the mind uses to assimilate information from an electronic medium is different than the method used for a printed text.  In an electronic medium like the internet, the eye moves all over the page, and the brain follows trains of thought in the same manner that the eye wanders.  When I am on Facebook, I notice this effect.  When logging into the site, I land on a page that amalgamates all of my friends’ posts into one continuous feed.  From this page, instead of moving to my profile, I begin clicking links to see the information that my friends have posted.  Eventually, an hour passes and I find that I have followed a path with very little meaning.  I have simply been clicking on anything of interest to me repeatedly.  If I were to draw a map of my track, it would resemble the old video game, Centipede, or a complex maze, constantly moving forward, recursing, and inching forward again.  This pattern has begun to emerge in my analysis of readings.  When I read a long, complex argument, I find it difficult to break it into pieces.  I will isolate a premise, but I will then trace that premise far from the original writing.  In the end, I find myself so far off track that it is difficult to return to the argument.

Lastly, and most importantly, despite all the pessimistic arguments that Carr makes against electronic media, he does identify one positive effect, efficiency.  Though he casts it in a negative light, he presents Google’s founders’ belief that “the more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.”

Because of the time I have spent interacting with electronic media, I am a much more efficient consumer of information.   When using Facebook, my mind is forced to digest information as a whole.  I must take in the whole page and then sift out the relevant and useful meaning within the page.  This capability makes me much more efficient at digesting a text and at identifying patterns.  The skills that I am learning on Facebook directly translate into academic and real-world experiences.  When confronted with a long text, I am quickly able to locate relevant information and process that information.  Additionally, I am quickly able to discard information that is mainly filler.  I can complete tasks at a faster rate and with a greater degree of precision.  When teaching an older person to use a computer, I have noticed that the learner is very slow to move the cursor and is slow in processing the information.  The amount of information on the screen is overwhelming and often an older person does not have the skills to sift through that much data at one time.

Based on my personal experience, the critique that Carr levies against digital media is perhaps just a critique of print media.  Maybe the text that is overlong is trying to communicate too much.  Compare a 19^th century novel to a 20^th century novel.  The average page length of the 20^th century novel is significantly less.  However, does this mean that the 20^th century novel is less complex?  The idea that length and complexity are interrelated is fallacious.  A writing is not more complex for being longer.  In fact, the opposite is often true.  Creating a complex work in a small amount of space is very difficult.  The influence of electronic media is that it makes the creator focus on the message.  It requires the reduction of extraneous information in pursuit of clarity and brevity.  Instead of assuming that the change from print to electronic media is negative, perhaps we should assume that it is positive.  As Carr notes in his article, Socrates was dismayed at the invention of written language believing it would lead to a decline in thought and ability.  Instead, it led to an increase.  Carr is very close to becoming a Socrates as are many of the doomsayers and critiques of modern information mediums.

Works Cited

Birkerts, Sven. “Into the Electronic Millenium.” Boston Review (1991): n. pag. Boston Review. Web. 11 Oct. 2012. <http://bostonreview.net/BR16.5/birkerts.html>.

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Magazine July 2008: n. pag. The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company. Web. 11 Oct. 2012. <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/>.