What the Internet is doing to our brains IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID By Nicholas Carr ...I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets--reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.) For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. 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. I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances--literary types, most of them--many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. ...
What the Internet is doing to our brains
IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID By Nicholas Carr
...I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets--reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. 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.
I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances--literary types, most of them--many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. ...
i think the interactivity and conversations in realtime with folks all over is just more fascinating than labouring over one's own magnum opus.
maybe it's still the 'shiny new toy' syndrome, or that since 9/11 the political has inserted and ratcheted itself irrevocably into the personal, and we are still in shock, scrolling and clicking away in search of coherent narratives that will give us a better handle on dealing with the new realities...
2c ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
i used to inhale ridiculous amounts of book-knowledge, i hardly ever reeeed a book now, it's just too static, frozen in some past time.
but if a book is all i have, then into it i go, with the same pleasure and depth as before.
the brain knows how it wants it,
furiously clicking and mousing away... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
i think tv messed with peeps' aptitude to read books deeply more than the web, ecktually... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
trying to read proust or trollope or even henry james with a 21st century brain is like learning to swim in taffy.
style might be the best readout, then density was king, compression of meaning into slabs of compacted meaning, to be unpacked without competition from braying tv's and yelling web popups.
now peeps need to come up for air every 20 seconds, so space and concision rule, little bites, little time...
scatter, diffuse, dilute, spray, mist, atomise- news entropises into nothingness, forgotten in the new waves of novelty, heads-up every few seconds till you noggin's bobbing like an apple in a barrel!
there's a lot more wind of change blowing nowadays, everything not nailed down by pragmatic considerations is a form of intellectual luxury few can afford. modern day angst creates a rich enough a mixture of apprehensions that are only just recently being accurately named, (PTSD), making people uneasy about concentrating on anything too intensely, in case they lower their guard and some terr'ist does something stupid...
events speeding up means by def less time for reflection, alas! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
