Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Perhaps with some justification, contemporary critics of technology often get dismissed as “luddites”—a reference to a movement of British artisans who tried to halt mechanized manufacturing in the nineteenth century. Yet one of those critics, Nicholas Carr, is anything but backward-looking. A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and a member of the steering board for the World Economic Forum’s cloud computing project, Carr is a most astute inside observer of technological change. More than many writers on the subject of the Web, who tend to be praise it hyperbolically, he has been able to step back and ask about the larger and less positive implications. In his book The Big Switch (2008), Carr disputes the notion that the Web is inherently democratic. The rise of the PC in the early 1980s brought about a temporary flourishing of individual creativity, but that freedom has been lost, Carr maintains, with the shift away from PCs to the Net. The client-server system that increasingly holds sway has permitted corporations and bureaucrats to reassert their customary mastery over worker-citizens. He writes that as the “pages of the World Wide Web turn into the unified and programmable database of the World Wide Computer . . . a powerful new kind of control becomes possible.” While a site like Facebook seems to provide endless opportunities for personal expression and networking among friends, it can actually erode privacy on a scale that would be the envy of even the most obsessive of surveillance states.

One important strain of Carr’s work is a critique of “techno-utopianism,” the idea that technological change will automatically have positive results. As he recognized in an earlier book, Does IT Matter (2004), the advantages of a new technology tend to get wildly exaggerated the first time they are trotted out. Over time, he reasons, the Net will become ordinary and predictable, like the plumbing in our homes or the highway system. The pace of innovation will slow down and businesses will have to look elsewhere for their competitive advantage. More recently Carr’s thinking has taken a new turn, as he has examined the cognitive effects of the Web on its users. In a widely circulated article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” and in the book that followed, The Shallows (2010), Carr makes the case that the “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.” And he alleges that the Net is changing thought today in a way that makes it increasingly shallow--unreflecting and blandly standardized. Once,” he writes, “I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” The Atlantic, July/August 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868.
Biographical information drawn from http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/index.shtml http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/index.shtml
and quotation in first paragraph from http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/

Links to Explore:

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's blog.

Nicholas Carr on The Colbert Report:A video of Carr's appearance on the Comedy Central show.

The Price of Free: an article by Carr in The New York Times Magazine

Questions for Connecting:

• In rather different ways, both Carr and Oliver Sacks are part of a larger cultural shift: a turning away from the "mind" to the "brain" as the key term for understanding ourselves. Since ancient times, philosophers have written on the mind and on faculties like reason and imagination, which they saw as unchanging and universal. By contrast, the brain is now understood to be highly "plastic"-that is, subject to deep changes in the way it operates, depending on the environment. In what ways might this shift from mind to brain transform how we view human nature? On the basis of your reading of Sacks and Carr, would you say a fixed "human nature" exists at all?
• In "Immune to Reality," Daniel Gilbert makes an argument about the complexity of human motivations, arguing that "people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing." He means that we often overlook our real motives, which are largely unconscious, preferring to make up reasons that seem to fit with our conscious assumptions and beliefs. Often the result is unhappiness, even when we get exactly what we want. Using Gilbert as your starting point, take a second look at the promise of the Internet, and then compare it to reality. When we sing the praises of this new technology, are we actually engaged in what Gilbert calls "cooking the facts"? Does Carr's essay support the view that the Internet has been wildly oversold?

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