Google rots your brains

I found a fascinating article from the ever-interesting Nicholas Carr (remember "IT Doesn't Matter"?) on how Google is making us stupid.

I reproduce an extract here as you won't have time to read it:

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. 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... 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 reminded of a phrase from the delightful Doctor in the House books by Richard Gordon, about last-minute cramming for medical exams, which went something like "dashing pell-mell down the corridors of knowledge, snatching handfuls along the way". Google is all about snatching handfuls.

As I quickly scanned this article it occurred to me to give you three more factors besides Google:

Magazines had already superceded books bacause they were the only way to stay current before the advent of the internet. I still read books for stimulation, but I long ago stopped reading books to stay up with the latest developments. As a result people were already becoming accustomed to two-or-three page summations, to having their knowledge pre-digested by journalists and delivered in little chunks like petfood.

Television had of course already destroyed most traces of critical analysis or systematic thought in large tracts of the population, especially what passes as news and current affairs today as compared to even twenty years ago. Most TV news makes the USA Today newspaper look in-depth. If it can't be delivered in a thirty-second sound-bite it isn't covered.

The third contributor to speed reading is software user guides and manuals which are so packed with useless repetitive puerile crap and contain so few nubs of useful information that nobody actually reads them any more. Most IT people are adept at extracting the juice from a hundred-page manual in a few minutes. Nowadays most manuals are only provided in pdf on a CD which only hastens the process.

My mother is 84 now. She marvels at how I can read a newspaper article in less than a minute while simultaneously talking to her. None of my friends would notice.

On another topic [that one went on much too long], Carr's most telling point is "The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure". I don't think it has one and I shudder to think how many generations will have to pass and how many horrors emerge before it develops one.