Is Google Making Us Stoopid?

I recently picked up a magazine waiting for a friend as the title looked familiar, Is Google Making us Stupid?. (If memory serves, I think it was Joe Lamantia who Twittered about this a few weeks back.)

Nicholas Carr looks to past technological advances that have forever changed the way we think, learn, and ultimately communicate with one another:

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.

Carr goes on to compare other technological advances throughout human history and how these “advances” have changed the way we live, work, and play, including:

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 information age has allowed us to consume data at a phenomenal rate…with little time to put knowledge gained, into practice. It is through the experience of failing and trying new approaches to problems that allow us to make wise decisions in the future.

As I have argued in the past, knowledge is no longer power. Relationships and ultimately conversation, (in both literal and metaphorical senses), have become the basis for power in organizations. If the inventions we take for granted today such as the typewriter and the clock had such a massive change in the way we live, work, and think how will a technology like the Internet impact humanity?

Playwright Richard Foreman describes how the information age has moved us from a thoughtful, engaged community to one of “information junkies” who constantly need an “information fix” to satisfy our ever increasing desire for data:

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.”

If the net is changing the way we consume and process information, I wonder why we continue to ignore these changes to improve our educational systems; our businesses; and our Governments? I think the answer lies in the ideas outlined in this article. We don’t take the time to understand, only to consume.