Is Google Making Us Stupid?

“THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF IRON
YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.
PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE
AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS TO USE US."

“Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”

--Nietzsche

In what should be terrifying news for self-declared technophobes, the internet is devastatingly (and perhaps irreversibly) changing the way we think. The reason for this is simply the way information is given to us on the web. The huge proliferation of blogs, many with posts of only a few paragraphs; news feeds; multiple tabs; and status updates limited to 420 characters in length – these things may be making us stupid. This superabundance of readily available and instantly accessible information seems to destroy our ability to concentrate on longer texts. We skim, but don’t read. There is too much out there to sit and think about what we have just finished reading. In short, we are being trained – programmed, if you will – to think in a new way, a way that is incompatible with the style of thinking that has been common to most humans throughout history. Taking this argument to the extreme, it will not be long before people will find it a great struggle to get through one of the books that populate our libraries.

The Net is not all awesomeness and unicorns. It is no doubt a great thing that people can access a lot of information, that groups can form and exert power that would not ordinarily be available to them IRL. This paper, though, shows the dark side of the Net. Haraway, for one, recognized that such a side existed. But whereas for her, not being at all a determinist about technology, the new sources of oppression and other problems were the structured relations among people, now it seems like the technology itself threatens us.

Of course, we have always had this relationship with technology, especially that technology surrounding communication. Plato feared that writing would destroy our intelligence, because we would not carry information around in our heads, but only give the impression of having knowledge. Gutenberg’s press faced the same arguments. Nietzsche, using an early typewriter so he could write while going blind, wrote to a friend about how the machine guided his thoughts. And our current communication technologies have always given us the metaphors we use to describe the mind.

This may mark me as a Luddite, but the possibility of becoming a pancake person scares the shit out of me. Even as I write this in one of the eleven tabs open in this browser, I fear that my cognitive abilities are slipping in a way that cannot be accounted for by stress and sleep loss. We may have always been cyborgs, but I never signed up for this. My only hope is that there is a way to make the most of the Net’s liberating potential without losing contact with history, without losing my mind.