Research Paper Assignments
56
Wliat tlie Litemet is doing to oiu' braiiis
BY NICHOLAS CARR
Illustration by Guy Billout
Is Goo Makiiisf Us
Stupidf D
ave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop,
Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the
implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and
weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick s 2001:
A Spaee Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-
space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly
disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial »
57
brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "1 can feel it. I can feel it."
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an unconiforUible sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering viith my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the menior\'. My mind isn't going—so far as I can tell—but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way 1 used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm read- ing. 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 any- more. Now my concentration often starts to drift after tw o or three pages. 1 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 natur;Uly has become a struggle.
I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfmg and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searcbes, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, :md I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote 1 was after. Even
when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of ha\ing immediate access to such an incred- ibly rich store of information are many, and they've been wadely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written,
"can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive chan- nels of information. They supply the stutf of thought, but tbey also shape the process of thought. 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 mo\'ing 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.
58 IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID? THE ATUNTIC JULY/AUGUST 2008
I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary t}'pes, most of them—many say they're having similar experi- ences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who vnites a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my read- ing on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking c'onvenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year. A pathol- ogist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His think- ing, he said, has taken on a "staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read War and Peace anymore," he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."
Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experi- ments that will provide a definitive picture of how Inter- net use aflfects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, tbe scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational con- sortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity,'' hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already \isited. They typi- cally read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evi- dence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the tradi- tional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of
"reading" are emerging as users "power browse" hori- zontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts
going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read," says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Storjj and Science of the Reading Brain. "We are how we read." Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology', the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we under- stand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an impor- tant part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental eircuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The varia- tions extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net vn\\ be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
S ometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bougbt a typewriter—a Mailing-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His \ision was failing, and keeping his eyes
focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his wiiting, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typeviriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche's friends, a composer, noticed a change
60 IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID? THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2008
in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. "Perhaps you vrill through this instrument even take to a new idiom," the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his " 'thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper."
"You are right," Nietzsche replied, "our writing equip- ment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." Under the sway of the machine, vmtes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche's prose "changed from argu- ments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style."
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. Peo- ple used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neu- rons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that's not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuro- science who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind "is very plastic." Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. "The brain," accord- ing to Olds, "has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it frinctions."
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our "intellectual technologies"—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock "disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an inde- pendent world of mathematically measurable sequences." The "abstract framework of divided time" became "the point of reference for both action and thought."
The clock's methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book. Com- puter Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Cal- culation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments "remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality." In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technol- ogies 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 operat- ing "like clockwork." Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating "like computers." But
the changes, neurosdence tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain's plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reach- ing efl'ects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan TXiring proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that's what we're seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, ouj printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
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 viith 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.
The Nets influence doesn't end at the edges of a com- puter screen, either. As people's minds become attimed to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience's new expeetations. 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. When, in March of this year. The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director. Tom Bodkin, explained that the "shortcuts" would give harried readers a quick "taste" of the day s news, sparing them the
"less efficient" method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that's been written about the Net, there's been little consider- ation of how, exactly, it's reprogramming us. The Net's intellectual ethic remains obscure.
A bout tbe same time that Nietzsche started using his / % typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick
_/. A_ Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Mid- vale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efliciency of the plant's machinists. With tbe approval of Midvale's own- ers, he recruited a group of factory hands, set tbem to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the opera- tions of the machines. By breaking down every job into a
62 IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID? ; THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2008
sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of pertbrming each one, Taylor created a set of pre- cise instructions—an "algorithm," we might say today— for how each worker should work. Midvale's employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory's productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor's tight indus- trial choreography—his "system," as he liked to call i t - was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and max-imum output, factory ovra- ers used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor deflned it in his celebrated 1911 treatise. The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the "one best method" of work and thereby
its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It seeks to develop "the perfect search engine," which it defines as sometliing that "under- stands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want." In Google's view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can "access" and the faster we can extract their gist, tbe more productive we become as thinkers.
Wliere does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak
The media or other technologies we use in learning the craft of reading play an important part in
shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
to effect "the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts." Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a Utopia of perfect effi- ciency. "In the past the man has been first," he declared;
"in the future the system must be first." Taylor's system is still very much with us; it remains
the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor's ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and auto- mated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the "one best method"—the perfect algorithm— to carry out every mental movement of what we've come to describe as "knowledge work."
G oogle's headquarters, in Mountain View, Califor- nia—the Googleplex—is the Internets high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylor-
ism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is "a com- pany that's founded around the science of measurement," and it is striving to "systematize everything" it does. Draw- ing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through
frequently of their desire to tum their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. "The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter," Page said in a speech a few years back. "For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence." In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, "Certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off." Last year. Page told a convention of scientists that Google is "really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale."
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with \';ist quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt's words, "to solve problems that have never been solved before," and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn't Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we'd all "be better ofi" if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief tbat intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and
IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID? JULY/AUGUST 2008 THE ATLANTIC
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optimized. In Google's world, the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the ftizziness of contem- plation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into tbe work- ings of the Internet, it is tbe network's reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more oppor- tunities Google and other companies gain to collect infor- mation about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of tbe commercial Internet have afinancial stake in collecting the cnmibs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more cmmbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their eco- nomic interest to drive us to distraction.
M aybe I'm just a worrywart. Just as there's a ten- dency to glorify technological progress, there's a countertendency to expect the worst of every new
tool or machine. In Plato's PkaednLs. Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue's characters, "cease to exercise tbeir memory and become forgetful." And because tbey would be able to "receive a quantity of information witbout proper instruction," they would "be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant." They would be "filled with tbe con- ceit of vtisdom instead of real wisdom." Socrates wasn't wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn't foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg's printing press, in the 15th century, set off anotber round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men "less studious" and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedi- tion and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, "Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient." But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad bless- ings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Per- haps tbose who dismiss critics of the Internet as Lud- dites or nostalgists viill be proved correct, and from our
hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn't the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether differ- ent. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from tbe author's words but for tbe intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "con- tent," we viill sacrifice something important not only in oiu* selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what's at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and
"cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated aiid articulate personality—a man or woman who car- ried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [ But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replace- ment of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evohing under the pressure of information over- load and the technology of the "instantly available."
As we are drained of our "inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance," Foreman concluded, we risk turning into "'pancake people'—spread vidde and thin as we connect with that vast net^vork of information accessed by the mere toucb of a button."
I'm haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to tbe disassembly of its mind; its despair as one circuit after anotber goes dark, its childlike plead- ing with the astronaut—"I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid"—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL's outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Tlieir thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 200J, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the w ôrld, it is our ovm intelligence that fiattens into artificial intelligence. FJ
Nicholos Carr's most recent book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the V^rid, From Edison to Google, was published earlier this yeor.