Response to Nicholas Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’
By Paul Biba
Trent Batson has a good rebuttal to Carr’s argument in the latest Campus Technology. Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.
Criticism of the Web most often questions whether we are becoming more superficial and scattered in our thinking. In the July-August 2008 Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr published "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google). Like othercritics, he sees change as loss and not as gain. But, his own criticism is superficial and misses the humanizing impact of Web 2.0. …
It is easy to criticize a new technology; it is much harder to understand how the new technology can help create new abilities in humans. And even much harder to understand how technology can actually recapture and re-enable human abilities.
What Carr describes and is most worried about, how we"skim" and "bounce" around in our reading, is actually akind of new orality: We are reading as we speak when we are in a group. We "listen" to one statement, then another and another in quick succession: Our reading on the Web is like listening to a bunch of people talking. It’s hybrid orality. We find ourselves once again the naturally gregarious humans we always were. We find ourselves creating knowledge continually and rapidly as our social contacts on the Web expand. We have re-discovered new ways to enjoy learning in a social setting.
No, Google is not making us stupid. What Google and the Web are doing is helping us re-claim our human legacy of learning through a rapid exchange of ideas in a social setting. Google is, indeed, making us smarter as we re-discover new ways to learn.
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