Kamil Pasha

I just read Nicholas Carr’s thought-provoking article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. It’s not about Turkey (although it does resonate with some of my posts on education), but it’s well worth reading — in its entirety, not just the pre-masticated summary excerpts I offer below to tantalize you.

Anyone who writes, teaches, reads or thinks for a living should read this. It reminds me of my own students in the US college where I teach, who are the products of really only the last 10 years of US culture and technology. Before that, they don’t remember anything. (I have to continually edit my language — no more cassettes, dialing a phone, disks, etc.) When I ask students to do some research to answer a set of conceptual questions about a certain topic, in recent years they have begun to present Powerpoint displays that feature much information, but little thought. They answer ‘What?’, presumably via Google searches, but no longer know how to answer (or even ask) ‘Why?’

Here is my pre-masticated set of excerpts for those of you with the attention span of regular Google users. For the rest of you, click here for the entire article.

From Carr’s article:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s… But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self… Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University,… worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged…

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers…

[The] easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well…. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction…

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. 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…

That’s the essence of [Stanley] Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Tags: Education, Uncategorized //