Is Google Making Us Stupid

Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Brainstorming:

Personal Quotes and ideas

· 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. (2)

· 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. (2)

· The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. (3)

· The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.(4)

· And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. (4)

· Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. (4)

· I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. (5)

Other well-known individuals have had their reading and thinking changed as a result of continued use (Karp, Friedman- “staccato effect”, quick scans) loss of concentration.

Is the skill/act of reading connected to thinking? Carr wonders if they are related. (6)

Cognition and Reading Research and Effect on the Mind

· Scholars from University College London examine Internet and thinking (cognition) and discovered “skimming activity” by Internet users which researchers’ label “power browse”, a new form of reading/thinking. (7)

· People are more today than in the past three to four decades, but doing so in a different way (method). (8)

· Psychologist Wolf describes the Internet reading as “immediate” and “efficient” but sacrifices deep reading and thinking. We become, in her words, “decoders of information” disengaged from the interpretation needed for better understanding of the idea presented to us. (8)

· Wolf claims that reading places a challenge to the cognitive area of the mind since it is such an unnatural process, filled with symbols, directions and other affects. (8)

Intellectual Technologies and Influence on Human Behavior through the Ages

Carr suggests that technologies such as a typewriter place an unusual effect on our mind and our behavior. He explains using an example from Nietzsche and his use of the typewriter (10, 11, 12).

· People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. (14) Olds, a professor of neuroscience, claims that research shows that the brain is capable of forming new neural connections based on the type of activity one does (14). He states, “The brain has the ability to reprogram itself.”

Carr introduces sociologist Daniel Bell, Lewis Mumford, Joseph Weizenbaum, Alan Turing to further this idea he labels “intellectual technologies”.

· Humans begin to take on the characteristics of the technologies we use. (15). The mechanical clock is used a primary example of how humans take on technological characteristics. (15, 16) “deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.”

· Carr claims that we “adapt to new intellectual technologies” (17)

· The Internet promises to affect our cognition far greater than any other technology (18). “It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV”

The Internet’s Deep Influence on Our Lives (18 -22)

· Carr explains that the “Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image” and provides examples on the computer screen using emails, which results in our poor concentration and scattered attention (18, 19)

· Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media

· 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.

Carr explains technology’s influence by examining Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, which defines “maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum

output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the

jobs of their workers.” (24)

Taylorism is still with us today in the way we behave and operate in society, Carr explains.

· 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. (24)

· The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated 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.” (24)

Carr fears that Google and company are obsessed with this “perfect algorithm” to the point where the Google owners, scientists and engineers will do anything for this goal.

· The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.” (26)

· “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.” (27)

Carr disagrees with “you’d be better off” stating, if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. (28)

Carr continues with his fear of Google (29, 30 31) as he wonders in his article:

“ Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.”

Carr explains that past technologies have tended to have the same questions and effects on mankind:

· “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 sedition and debauchery.” (32)

· The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds (33)

· Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

Beware of Artificial Intelligence

Pancake People