Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The current July/August edition of The Atlantic has an eye-riveting cover story: Is Google Making Us Stupid? The sub-head of this feature by Nicholas Carr is, WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS.

Carr insists he is not a Luddite, no doubt for fear that if he gets labelled "anti-progress" his thesis will not be taken seriously. He claims that computers in general, and the Internet more specifically, and Google most deliberately, are changing the way we think in ways that should alarm us.

The positive side of Google is self-evident. Information that once might have taken days for a college paper may often be located in minutes, or faster. There are tremendous efficiencies here with regard to information.

But Carr proposes that what's going on has insidious side effects with regard to our human-ness in the same way the Industrial Age crushed people through its commitment to "maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output." Google's mission, he says, is to make our brains more efficient.

According to Google's chief exec Eric Schmidt, the company is founded on the idea of total measurement and systematization. The mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Who can argue with that? We all know about useless data and useless information.

Carr points out that this kind of efficiency creates new absolutes that do not leave room for "the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed."

In some ways this is not a new phenomenon. Edwin Aldrin, in his walk on the moon with Neil Armstrong in 1969, had fifteen seconds for "being human." The rest of his four hour stint was an effort to efficiently set up and execute eight hours of experiments. Some would say, "Hey, you got the privilege to have someone else pay for the ride that gave you a dream experience." But it could also be argued that this scientific approach to everything does something unkind to the soul.

Maybe that's Carr's concern. I don't really know how much weight to give it, but I sort of hear where he's coming from.

The author appears fair in his assessments. That is, he notes how Socrates objected to writing because people would rely on the written word and not use their brains to remember things. Yet the written word has opened worlds for us. And Gutenberg likewise had critics, but the availability of books has likewise created manifold blessings.

My take here is that we need to assume some personal responsibility in this matter. I myself do art, putz about the yard trimming a few branches, listen to music and in this manner bring balance to that "other side." And a daily time of reflection, journal writing, re-centering is for me something akin to the "breathe in, breathe out" rhythm of life. The goal of life is not to become a brain, but to become fully human, which includes mind, will, emotions... and soul.