Is the Web making us stupid?
Nicholas Carr has written an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?. Actually, it is about the Web in general and not just Google. One of Carr’s points is that our attention span is getting shorter and shorter:
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.
It is an article that should be looked at so I won’t try to encapsulate it here. Instead I urge you to actually read it. In a related post, I noted some time back that technology seemed to be ruining our memory processes and pointed to an article by Clive Thompson. What I wrote then still holds:
This brought to my mind something I read somewhere about Harvard students complaining about courses where they had to remember facts. They claimed that they didn’t have to know facts because they could always look them up. I wondered then and I wonder now how you can look up things whose existence is unknown to you.
I would add that it is not enough to have a bunch of “facts”. You need to be able to assess the reliability of the so-called facts and you need to be able to see how one thing relates to another.
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