Writing in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr considers whether or not the Internet is deteriorating our intellectual skills. He tells about a group of academics who found themselves bewildered as to why their ability to focus on long reading was diminishing, and the best answer that they could come up with was that they were spending so much time reading material on line that their brains had adapted to the shorter and disruptive presentation of information that the Internet provides. As it stands, though, there isn’t a great deal of empirical evidence to confirm these suspicions, just a growing body of anecdotal evidence.
It’s not a new phenomenon, he says. He gives us the example of how switching to the typewriter had an impact on the writing style of Friederich Nietzsche, and talks about how the mechanization of measuring time altered the way human beings interacted with the world around them — synchronizing their lives to the artifice of clock time rather than to their own natural circadian rhythms. But the emergence of a medium which can provide so much information so rapidly alters the way we relate to the information and the business imperatives of Google and Yahoo may have very little to do with the way we need to process information effectively. In other words, relevant search results may provide quick points of reference, but they don’t allow for the associations and tangential observations that long-focus information gathering provides.
I love this part where he quotes from playwright Richard Foreman:
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 completely empathize with this idea. The educated man of a century ago posessed a wide range of knowledge, but with that breadth there also came great depth from being taught through the history of thought. It resulted in such people being able to formulate central worldviews from which to consider what new information came to them, and to be able to draw from a variety of sources to imagine new ideas and theories. The downside to this model is that those worldviews could sometimes be ruinously wrong or misguided; the unshakeable confidence of fatally flawed thinking resulted in bad science, bad politics, and bad endings for many people. But, on the plus side, it spurred the greatest increase in human knowledge in the entire history of humankind. Now our general knowledge is becoming more and more constrained all the time — consider all those people who think Saddam Hussein caused 9/11, or who think Barack Obama is a Muslim, or can’t find Iraq on a map. And the ability to find smaller and more specific peices of information contributes to our blindered vision of the world around us.
