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JULY/AUGUST 2008

What the Internet is doing to our brains

by Nicholas Carr

Is Google Making Us Stupid? Illustration by Guy Billout

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 Space 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 “

brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. 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.

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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 surfing

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 searches, some

quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I 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 having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of

information are many, and they’ve been widely 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 channels of information. They supply the

stuff of thought, but they 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 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.

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. 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 writes

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

reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, 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 pathologist 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 thinking, 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 experiments that will

provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects 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, the 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

consortium, 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 visited. They typically 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 evidence that they ever went back and

actually read it. The authors of the study report:

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S

Also see:

LIVING WITH A COMPUTER (July 1982) "The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows

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. 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

Story 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 understand. And the media or other

technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits

inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for

reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The

variations 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 will

be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

ometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His

vision 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 writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up.

The typewriter 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 in the style of his

writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will 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 equipment takes part in the forming of

our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar

Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from

thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. 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. But brain researchers

have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who

directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.”

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Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram

itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

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 independent 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, Computer Power and Human

Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, 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 technologies 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 operating “like clockwork.” Today, in

the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience 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-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British

mathematician Alan Turing 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, our 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 with 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 Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy

quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. 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, TheNew 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 consideration of how,

exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

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bout the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow

Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of

experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners,

he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and

timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small,

discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise 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 industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by

manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking 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. The goal, as Taylor defined 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 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 efficiency. “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 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.”

oogle’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the

religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company

that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does.

Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through 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 something that “understands 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, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where 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 frequently of their desire to turn 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

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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 vast 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 off” 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. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place

for the fuzziness of contemplation. 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 the workings of the

Internet, it is the 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 opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us

advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we

leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage

leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

aybe 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. In Plato’s Phaedrus, 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 their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information

without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom 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 another 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 sedition 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 blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists

will 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 different. 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. 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.

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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. 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 and articulate personality—a man or woman

who carried 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 replacement of complex inner density

with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload 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 wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch 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 the

disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading 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. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the

world of 2001, 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 world, it is our

own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

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TV drama suffers too.docx

latimes.com

A dramatic decline for network dramas

Trying to hold the attention of multi-tasking viewers is proving problematic for these plot-intensive shows, with only five of the 22 series premiering this season likely to survive.

By Joe Flint, Los Angeles Times

May 12, 2011

James Wong knew he was in trouble when his own daughter turned on him. The co-executive producer of "The Event," an NBC drama about the repercussions of a government cover-up of an alien landing, was watching an episode with his daughter, Taylor, when she yelled in frustration about all the flashbacks the show employed to tell its story. "She stormed out of the room and never watched the show again," Wong said, laughing. Taylor wasn't alone. Many tired of having to pay such close attention to all the plot twists in "The Event." "I kept hearing, 'After a hard day's work I don't want to have to think,'" Wong said. The show premiered to almost 11 million viewers, but this week's episode had less than half that audience, and "The Event" probably won't make it to a Season 2. The sci-fi show wasn't the only new drama to struggle this season. In fact, of the 22 dramas that have premiered on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the CW, only five are likely to make it to a sophomore year. Part of the problem, explain producers, is that digital-age audiences don't just focus solely on their screens these days. Like traffic cops dealing with distracted drivers who text and blab on the phone while sailing down the freeway, networks executives are facing viewers who are often fiddling with their computers, phones or iPads. "Most people are watching TV with a laptop on their legs," said Laurie Zaks, executive producer of the ABC mystery "Castle." "If you don't capture the audience in the first two episodes, you don't have a chance." Indeed, research conducted in 2009 by Ball State University's Center for Media Design backs up the theory of the distracted viewer. According to the center, about 20% of television watchers are also playing with computers or other media at the same time. And that study was conducted before the iPad was released and the iPhone really took off. The figure is certainly higher now, said Michael Holmes, the center's director of insight and research. If a computer or iPad is on, the television quickly becomes "the second most important screen in the room" Holmes said. "The Internet is a very engaging, interactive medium, so your attention is on that and the television recedes into the background." The challenge has forced producers to become even more creative in trying to keep viewers engaged. Robert and Michelle King, the married co-creators of CBS's "The Good Wife" go with the hostage approach. Typically, "The Good Wife" runs at least eight minutes before the opening credits and a commercial break, much longer than most shows. Last week's opening act ran 15 minutes. "When do you want to let people have a bathroom break, one minute into telling them the story or 15 minutes?," said Robert King, who added that the goal is to "get the viewer pregnant with the premise of that episode." Shawn Ryan, the creator of Fox's drama "The Chicago Code" about police and politics, made it a point to avoid having recaps of episodes at the start of every show. "There is a feeling that those things can turn off casual viewers," Ryan said. "They start to watch and go, 'Oh, I need to know all this other stuff, this isn't worth my time, I might as well turn on `Dancing With the Stars.'" Unfortunately for Ryan that still happened a lot, and this week Fox pulled the plug on "The Chicago Code." The rise of the multi-tasking viewer has reminded producers to keep their stories simple. "If you had to explain the whole season, it wouldn't take you more than a couple of sentences," quipped Bruno Heller, executive producer of the CBS murder mystery "The Mentalist." "Any scene that has to begin with, 'As you know…' or where you have to explain previous events, we avoid." Viewers with attention deficit disorder aren't the only problem. While cable channels are accustomed to smaller audiences and usually have the patience — and financial wherewithal — to let a program blossom, cash-strapped broadcast network executives often have itchy trigger fingers. "There is a cynicism that if it is good and complicated, it is going to get cancelled," said Ryan. "People don't want to get emotionally involved." "Network television has to be the Bruce Springsteen, while cable can be Patti Smith," said Heller. Some cable networks, however, are also backing away from the art-house approach. FX cancelled "Lights Out" and Ryan's "Terriers" after one season even though both had the love of critics. "Three years earlier, FX would have kept both on," said "Lights Out" executive producer Warren Leight, who added that FX President John Landgraf had told him before his show premiered, "Don't get me 'Mad Men' numbers and 'Mad Men' acclaim, that's not what I need." (AMC's "Mad Men" is a critical darling but has a relatively small audience even by cable standards.) The new technologies, which include the DVR and iTunes, present other headaches for networks as well. More than one-third of the audience for NBC's family drama "Parenthood" tunes into a recorded version of the show. "They know they can watch anytime," said the show's executive producer, Jason Katims. The problem though is that the audience that uses a DVR, iTunes or Hulu isn't nearly as valuable to the network and advertisers as those viewers who watch live because commercials are either fast-forwarded, out-of-date or not even in the program. Even top industry executives sometimes prefer watching on their own schedule. "I watched the first two seasons of HBO's "The Wire" on DVD and once I caught up, I was annoyed because I didn't want to watch one episode a week, I wanted to watch three or four episodes a night," said Katherine Pope, a former NBC executive who now oversees the television operations for Chernin Entertainment. [email protected]

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