Reaction to Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

From the Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008

It's strange to reading this after reading articles by so many major technology/literacy theorists. I realize that Carr is writing this for a popular audience, and I realize that I am very new to this field, but still... in the company of Hass, Coyne, Radder, Selfe, Postman, Baron, and others, Carr comes off as little more than a dilettante here. I see that he's written a couple of books on technology, so maybe it's more a product of his audience here, but I see some major flaws in his claims and reasoning.

Overall, his answer seems to be yes. If Google's not making us stupid, it's at least changing the way our minds work, going from minds that can linger over large textual passages and think slowly and deeply about their significance—to minds that skim over the top of tons of info without time or care to really consider deeper truths. He reaches this conclusion in some weird ways too. He starts off with his own story and then anecdotes from others, which is cool. But then he acknowledges that “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.” This seems like a weird concession, and it paves the way for what I see—and again, it may be because of the intended audience—as a poor mixing of methodologies, one where he shifts from each one just as he's about to lose his argument. When the empirical science doesn't back him up, he goes to stories, etc.

In the light of other theorist, Carr comes off here as a reactionary, and golden-age-afier. He even acknowledges this, but then keeps going almost as if he hadn't. He argues that the changes in the way we think are bad, but never really says why. Why aren't they just changes? This is the biggest weakness I see. He even mentions how people always react to changes in tech—which always bring about changes in thinking—negatively and how many times they are proven wrong... but then he still keeps saying that this time it really is a bad thing...

For example, and I think this is the biggest weakness in his argument, he has two historical examples that can be seen as completely contradictory. He mentions how Nietzsche used a typewriter for his later work, and that this changed his writing, as Friedrich A. Kittler says, “from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” But as a reader, I'm asking if this is necessarily bad. In fact, after reading people like McLuhan, who talks about how the technology of writing itself served to take primal peoples away from their immediate experience with each other and with the world, I could almost argue that Nietzsche’s newer style creeped back toward that immediacy. Right? His later work takes you right to this thought, less mediated by prose. I'm not saying that's good, but I'm rejecting Carr's claim that it's definitely bad.

Then he goes on to talk about how the invention of the clock changed the way people thought too—it turned their thinking into a more mechanical system, which soon led to something that I think Carr would like: the scientific mind. Isn't that kind of what Carr says we're losing? Those abilities to thinking deeply and analytically? Here's where I think he loses it: he only gives a little acknowledgment of that achievement before he goes on to lament the downside of this new way of thinking: “we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.” Wait, isn't that a lot like how McLuhan said preliterate peoples lost immediacy with the world with the advent of the written word? So which way does Carr want to have it? Is it BAD that Nietzsche’s later style brought readers to a more immediate experience with his ideas, but took away the pleasure of drifting through long passages of his prose to get there, or is it good because it may in a sense return us to that state of immediacy? Or am I missing something? Maybe.

But here's where I really lose faith in Carr and any notion that he might be right; and yes, I realize that it's probably Atlantic and not him, but still, this is really messed up. Before he goes on to acknowledge that he may be acting just like I'm accusing him of acting, he says that this new way of thinking that we're developing falls right into the hands of marketers and advertisers who use our inclination to quickly jump from page to page to sell us their stuff. Okay, probably right. But then this guy goes on to mention Plato's Phaedrus, and it is a hot link. To what? To Amazon, the page where you can buy the book. Come fucking on. I looked it up on Google books, and I found a FREE version of the entire text in about six seconds. So who's selling who, and who is disseminating information democratically? That's bullshit.

It's really hard to get past that. Yes, Carr does suggest that he may be a “worrywart,” but I don't think he actually considers it enough. Things are changing, times change, the way we think changes; things change. Change can be bad; it can fall into the advantage of the oppressive cast who want to keep others down; but it doesn't have to. I think that was Radder's point. But resisting change for its own sake just seems fearful and stubborn, and I don't think Carr has really brought up any reason to react against the way that the Net is changing our thinking other than that fact that the way we think is indeed changes. But has it ever been a stable thing? Should it be? Those are questions he seems to just take for granted as given truths.