Haunted by Google?

Last weekend, I received my copy of the June/July Edition of The Atlantic Monthly, arguably the best general interest magazine in the country. I was stunned to find out that the cover story was about the deleterious effects of Google on my cognitive capacities.

Nicholas Carr frets:

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.

The Googleplex is destroying cognition, in short, because it makes us intellectually lazy. We don't have to think as hard, so we don't.

To his credit, Carr recognizes that his concerns aren't new. In fact, they are precisely the same concerns that Plato had about writing.

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).

But Carr is still "haunted" by the horror of Google and Internet technology.

In reflecting on the article, I'm still puzzled. What in the world does this handwringing even mean? Marshall McLuhan reminds us that technology always changes our understanding of ourselves in unexpected, even perverse ways. But that doesn't mean that we're all going to die. The underlying capacity of human beings--creativity, curiousity, ability to learn and adapt, etc.--won't change. So Google is making us think in different ways. In some ways, it will be better; in some ways, it will be worse.

It's not like a meteor is going to wipe out the planet. Oh. The Atlantic covered that last month.