Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” in the Atlantic discusses the effect “reading” snippets of information on the Internet has on our brains. In the spirit of snippets, here are some quotations from the article:
- 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.
- And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
- It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
- “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
- “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
- We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
- … we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
- That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
