TECHNOLOGY

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

What the Internet is doing to our brains
By Nicholas Carr

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that
something has been manipulating my brain. I can feel that my
mind is changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can
feel it mostly when I’m reading. Concentrating in a book or a long
article used to be easy. My mind used to be entertained by the
narrative and I could spend hours reading long paragraphs. That
doesn’t happen anymore. Now my concentration starts to
dissappear after two or three pages. I get anxious, lose the thread,
begin looking for something else to do. The deep reading that used
to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve
been spending a lot of time online. For me, as for others, the Web
is now the main form of communication. The internet is the
channel for most of the information that enters my eyes, my ears
and my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to an
incredible amount of information are many. Twenty years ago, if
you wanted to research a certain topic you would have to spend
hours reading different books and en cy clo pe di as. Now you do
a few Google searches, some quick clicks and you have found the
information in minutes.
But these advantages have a price. As the media theorist Marshall
McLuhan said in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of
information. They give you information to think about, but they
also change the way you think. And what the Net seems to be
doing is destroying my capacity for concentration. My mind now
expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: at an
incredibly high speed. Years ago, when I was reading, I felt like a
scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I feel I go very quickly
through the surface, like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Some studies suggest that, we read more today than we did in the
1970s or 1980s, when television was the most popular form of
communication. That is because text is everywhere on the
Internet, and also because of how often we use text-messaging on
our cell phones. But this reading is a different kind of reading, it’s
not the same as reading a 300 page novel. Maryanne Wolf, a
developmental psychologist at Tufts University, thinks that when
we read online we focus on “efficiency” and “immediacy”. We
want to get the maximum amount of information in the minimum
amount of time. This may be debilitating our capacity for deep
reading and contemplation. When we read online, she says, we
tend to simply accumulate information. Our brains don’t make the
profound mental connections that used to form when we read
deeply and without distraction.