This is one of the scariest thoughts in the entire article. When the system become first and foremost people will loose the ability to think and reason for themselves. They will look to the system to think for them.
This link has been bookmarked by 1281 people and liked by 1 people. It was first bookmarked on 10 Jun 2008, by Takuya Homma.
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Melissa StormThis caught my eyes because of the comment/text "to whom did these questions addressed before google?" (Rose 2012) in the "Did You Know? Shift Happens" video
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diegomarananI don't think it's Google per se that is making us stupid, but hyper-connectivity is flattening out knowledge, turning information into threads... and making unable to concentrate on JUST ONE THING.
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anex anex...the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the
printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of
deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not
just for the knowledge we acquire from the -
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13 May 10
Australian LiteratureI can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.
attention span books comprehension google intelligence internet reading short web
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10 May 10
Giorgio BertiniI can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.
attention span books comprehension intelligence internet reading short web learning change
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ave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the super
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ave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
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Dale WeinsteinThe googling of the world has huge ramifications. Historical assessment of the impact of changing technologies of information transmission and the impact on our very neurological cerebral sequencing. We are becoming, in some regard, stupid. Yes, there has always historically been concerns about the changing transmission of information and even the advent of books, etc. Going all the way back to Plato. McLuhan: the process of thought leads to the product of....\nVery comprehensive, informative, terrific summary of the effect on us all of the internet mentality. TERRIFIC
reading culture brain education psychiatric Internet Atlantic
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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.
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the Net is becoming a universal medium
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Jason BunnCarr, Nicholas. Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Atlantic. July/August 2008. February 11, 2010.
This article discusses how Google seems to be making us dumb by saying that we as people have short attention spans and cannot read long articles due to technology. The author is blaming today's bad habits on technology. -
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Maria ThomasADOS: Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny.
writing thinking attention ADD ADHD reading literature google journalism
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“We are not only what we read,”
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Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time.
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His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,”
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“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
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James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
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As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
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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.
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Andy TeddWhat the Internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr Great article - pancake people - the corollary of flat knowledge
PhD innovation criticism google psychology Mcluhan Taylor flat_knowledge for:@twitter
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Now my concentration often starts to drif
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Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes
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the Net is becoming a universal medium
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media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought
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hat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation
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The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing
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College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think
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They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,”
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19 Jan 10
mei m.This article argues that Google's search engine function will ultimately have a degenerative effect on our intelligence. Carr suggests that searching will become an intermediary between us and the world and that eventually, that dependency will morph our intelligence into artificial intelligence.
google technology online literacy literacy development intelligence
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16 Jan 10
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to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. On
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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.
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Jenny Darrowthe 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,
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media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. -
12 Jan 10
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Martin Lindner“In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and so -
10 Jan 10
David KoppenhaverNicholas Carr's article about the impact of the internet on reading behavior and memory in the Atlantic. Thoughtful piece with hyperlinks to additional good info. Going to make this required reading in my reading methods classes and tech methods classes.
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07 Jan 10
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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.
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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.
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But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think
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They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
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We are how we read.” Wolf 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.
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Living With a Computer
(July 1982)
"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows
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02 Jan 10
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I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
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“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,”
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“I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
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Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition.
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we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.
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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.
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Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
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“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
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Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
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, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
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. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. 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.
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Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
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The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
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o, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism.
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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.”
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That’s the essence of 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.
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Billy GerchickInteresting article on the Internet and its effects on the brain.
asuthe 6 culture brain society web2.0 internet technology reading article education learning media for:dnemet
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21 Dec 09
moonflowerdragonAnecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducte
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Peter BeaumontLikening Google's algorithms for searching information to Frederick Winslow Taylor's 'Principles of Scientific Management' where every task was planned to increase productivity.
Quote: "In the world of 2001 [the film], people have become so machinelike t -
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ut it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.
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Wolf 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.
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The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
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The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.”
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Jen NashArticle about the way reading practices have changed in the internet era.
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28 Nov 09
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Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
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aleot aleotWhat the Internet is doing to our brains - by Nicholas Carr
“The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as opergoogle internet technology culture brain article web2.0 education society reading
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he crazy quilt of Internet media
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heir 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
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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 w
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e Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we
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he 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.
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produces something altogether different. 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
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Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
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29 Oct 09
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Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged
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Add Sticky Note“In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
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It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
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23 Oct 09
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I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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But that boon comes at a price
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And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
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His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality
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suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
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They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site.
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But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking
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We are how we read.” Wolf 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
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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.
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We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
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One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing
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says that even the adult mind “is very plastic
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But it also took something away.
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we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
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The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
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Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
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the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.
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Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.
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The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
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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.
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Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.
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Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.
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should
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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.
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But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
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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
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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.
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pancake people
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06 Oct 09
David ChenThis is an old article, but I thought quite appropriate given the discussion in class yesterday. This topic continues to fascinate me and I'd love to hear what you guys think about it.
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Gary Ritzenthalerhttp://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
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29 Sep 09
Public Stiky Notes
Today, if somebody is able to read long articles without interruptions, he's there because he loves what he reads, not because he absolutely wants to get something out of it. That's a big difference.
What's your purpose when you read ?
1. Do you read because you like the subject, because you are interested ?
2. Or do you read because you want to accumulate knowledge and get something out of it ?
In 1, most people read slowly, appreciate.
In 2, most people scans, don't really care.
if we read well we learn well...
Dan Colman's "In Bed With the Word" - improtance of reading
James Harken - "Lost in Cyburbia" - history and description of "Network"
"Obscenity begins when there's no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparant, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication."
Page Comments
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book5-2008jul05,0,3980465.story
The question is: how many people ever willingly "read deeply" and how many read "serious literature." Carr's anecdotal victims of internet dumbing down are not convincing. In fact, I read this whole (very long) article online. And as other respondents say, skimming predates the internet, and being able to access more raw information, rather than waiting for the media moguls to decide for us (I'm a journalist myself, btw),has the potential to make us collectivelysmarter, not the other way around. Not to mention more empowered, in an assortment of ways, viz. Denis Diderot's original encyclopedia.
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