Stupid’s Not Quite The Right Word…

It’s unfortunate Nicholas Carr’s new article in the Atlantic is titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?, because the headline is inviting some pretty easily-dished-out ridicule. The title should have been, Is Google Making Us…Different?, as that’s the argument Carr is putting forward. So when Carr points out the Internet makes it much easier to “skim” articles, Blaise Alleyne asks why this is “chilling” (a word not even used by Carr, but instead comes from a snarky post on Radar Online) and “problematic.” Carr doesn’t say that — he doesn’t say skimming is “bad.” What Carr says is:

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.

…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, when television was our medium of choice. 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.

Similarly, Mathew Ingram questions the “skimming activity” reference as well:

So let me get this straight — students skim things when they’re researching topics? Wow. That’s a real bombshell there. And the news that people skim information on the Internet doesn’t seem all that earth-shattering either; after all, there’s about a billion times as much info out there (broadly speaking) as there was a decade ago. Of course people are skimming.

Both critiques miss an essential element to Carr’s argument: medium theory. The simple version of this is McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” and as Carr points out, it’s not just the act of “skimming” that’s the issue, but the media through which we conduct this activity:

Reading…is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains…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.

Carr points to another example of how another technology (McLuhan, in fact, viewed all technology as “media”) , the mechanical clock, changed our sense of self:

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away…In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.”

I actually don’t think there’s much controversy about his overall premise — is there doubt that technology changes us, the way we think, and they way we think of ourselves? The work of McLuhan and Walter Ong is especially insightful here. The advent of the printing press, for example, transformed the act of reading from something “oral” and outward (even after writing, during what Ong and McLuhan call “manuscript culture,” reading was often done aloud) to something “interior.” Ong, in Orality and Literacy, describes the world of orality by asking us to “imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.” For oral cultures, phrases such as “look up” or “take a note” or “read through” are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing.

Technologies of literacy have always impacted our subjectivity, and today’s digital media are no exception.

This is what I think makes Carr’s article so powerful, that he’s articulating something we all know and sense. Can we really spell all that well anymore, when our spell-checkers do it for us? Can we write in cursive, when we now type our expressions (danah boyd has noted this…)? Can we continue to remember, when wikipedia does it for us?

Carr:

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

…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.

That’s the essential argument. That’s the question Carr is asking — how are we being reprogrammed?

In the end, I have no problem with critiquing Carr’s work. In fact, he asks his readers to be skeptical of his skepticism, likening himself somewhat to a modern-day Socrates, who bemoaned the advent of a new technology (writing), but missed the many ways literacy would expand human knowledge. But if we’re going to critique his work, we should at least not miss the essential message, even if the headline stupidly uses the word stupid (Carr never uses this term in his piece…). Carr doesn’t “hate the Internet,” and I think to set this article up as a Keen-style piece of pessimism is a bit unfair, and misses the point.

Yes, the headline is bad. And yes, Carr is something of a professional contrarian, but he’s asking the right questions, and provoking a discussion that’s not really happening outside of academic circles right now.

If he is a professional contrarian, he’s one I don’t mind having around…

[Update] Carr points to a thoughtful response from Jon Udell.

“Futures of the Internet” @ NYU

A couple of days ago, I attended a “Futures of the Internet” lecture at NYU. It brought together notable academics, practitioners, and artists, all attempting to describe where the future is headed. The discussion — and the audience — was informal, a bit raucous, and fun as hell. Here are some of my notes, apologize in advance for any thought-mangling…

Clay Shirky: Started by joking that as an academic, he’s smart enough to know never to predict the future. Better to let the future happen, and then explain why it did. Shirky believes we are in a “post-sitcom” era, as the sitcom was a major factor in transitioning our culture from the industrial age to today. He spoke a bit about the importance of social factors that make the Internet “work.” He sees “continued support for diverse surprises” on the net, and saw flexbility as its best feature.

Tim Wu: Sees the history of media as a pattern of decentralization to centralization, and the future is a collision between these two forces. So far, centralized media has always won out. He spoke of the “first YouTube era,” the early days of film, where something like 11 movies per day were being made. All media start this way, open, decentralized, and eventually they are co-opted and reigned it. So the central question is, will this happen to the Internet? Will it remain open, or will net neutrality fall? Will hard drives eventually get banned? Will the net turn into a “permissions-based” entity?

Lauren Cornell: She noted the art world’s economics have not really been threaten by the Internet; it’s still a curated system, based on scarcity. Rhizome started as a mailing-list community, and has grown from there, still retaining, though, that sense of community. “Artists and pornographers are always the ones to test new media.” She sees the newest generation of artists as using the web much more “intuitively” than others before them. Wonders if and how alternative economies for artists might develop in the future.

Jimmy Wales: Wonders how mass collaboration can be done with music, art, or video — on Wikipedia, since it’s text, it’s much easier. The tools may already be out there, but we just don’t have the social models for this type of collaboration. Global nature of the Internet is a major future trend — currently, about 1 billion people online, over the next 5-10 years will be the next billion (China, Africa). We will increasingly be in contact with new people. Concerned that free, open technologies may be closing, including a Chinese-style censorship model. (It’s not the firewall, which is actually quite porous; it’s the chilling effect.) An example of this closed model is the Facebook API, which is locking in developers to that platform.

Jonathan Zittrain: Sees three possible futures. First, “Rainbows and Buttercups” — the trippy, techno-utopian vision of freedom. A collective hallucination. Second, “Internet Meltdown” — openness of the net eaten away by reality: the ITU, the net becomes “enforceable and lockdown-able.” Third, “Not a Bang, But a Whimper” — pleasant but insidious, symbolized by the iPhone — a prison. Wants to see a “federated future,” one where everyone has some way to create “mischief,” outside of the “incumbents.” Need to be able to trust “everybody” (Shirky’s “everybody”), instead of just a few. Consumers need to come to realize they want a mischief box. Developers need to be more politically conscious.

After each of the above spoke, a lengthy discussion ensued, much of that around the idea of “community.” Shirky noted how most of today’s online collective action is “stop action” — protest. Not much is happening around “start action.” Shirky said we need a better way to address “groups” legally, as the only legal entity in this form today is the “corporation.” Wu added to that, noting that “community” has always been the great allure and great disappointment throughout history. Communities sometimes work so well, and other times not all at. We still haven’t figured out why, but it’s clear it’s not the technology, but the social factors that influences this.

There was also some time spent on the pros and cons of the OLPC program. Shirky questioned whether all that money is better spent funding students to attend schools, rather than this device. Most everyone agreed much of the technology inside the XO was on-target.

While my notes cannot really translate how engaging and insightful this discussion was, I hope it at least highlights what these folks are thinking about in terms of critical issues around Internet culture, and encourages anyone reading this to take a look at their work for more information.