Is Google Making Us Stupid?

“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. 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.”

Here, Carr begins interweaving his personal experience with a form of expert testimony: the assertions of the respected media theorist Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s cited assertions match up with Carr’s personal experience: As Carr’s consumption of Internet media has increased, it’s also begun to shape his process of thought, making it more clipped, less sensitive to subtlety, and more condensed and compressed. Here, Carr is essentially repeating the thought that he opened the essay with—but giving it more weight as he introduces quotes from respected scholars, theorists, and scientists that support his arguments. His argument is that we should be more judicious with examining the full effects of the Internet on cognition, instead of uncritically accepting it based on its merits alone. Carr believes that it is too easy to accept and enjoy the positive aspects of the internet—chiefly the way that it makes vast amounts of information and knowledge readily available—without more carefully attending to the amount of knowledge that the Internet makes accessible and the way it changes how humans actually think.

“Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become ‘mere decoders of information.’ Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

Here, Carr cites another respected figure: the developmental psychologist and author Wolf. Her cited thoughts corroborate Carr’s. He also incisively invokes the printing press as a precursor to the Internet. In so doing, he draws an analogy that informed readers can easily find resonance with: The profound effect of the printing press on culture, society, and human intellect is inarguable. Because the printing press had irrevocable effects on the accessibility of information and the way that information was processed, it logically follows that the Internet will have as much, if not greater, an impact.

“Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.”

In this quote, Carr uses a conversational tone to highlight a scientific reality. To support his assertion that the Internet is changing our access to information and the way that information is processed and understood by our brains, he cites established scientific precedent. This precedent states that the type of alphabet that a person uses shapes many aspects of their brain. The comparison between the English language and the Chinese language, and the accompanying effects on the brain of each language, is something that a reader can more easily understand as legitimate than Carr’s assertions about the Internet. The invocation of the clear ways that our native languages shape our cognition enables Carr to clearly call out the effects of the Internet on cognition.

“As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our ‘intellectual technologies’—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock ‘disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.’ The ‘abstract framework of divided time’ became ‘the point of reference for both action and thought.’”

Carr’s analogy of the clock to the Internet illustrates technology’s profound and far-reaching effect on human civilization and consciousness. Carr questions something that many see as fundamental and unchanging: the conception of time that has been generated by our use of the clock. By pointing out that this conception of time is artificial and based upon the technology of the clock, Carr asks his readers to challenge what they take for granted about their own cognition and consciousness, reminding us that not everything that feels natural is. As this analogy creates an awareness to the profound effect of technology, Carr hopes that his reader realizes that the Internet has just as much potential to completely reshape human consciousness as the clock did.

“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

Here, Carr almost likens the Internet to a contagion as he asserts that the Internet recreates the media that it absorbs. For Carr, the transformation of information and written texts into Internet texts involves a corruption. The instantaneous and variable immediacy that the Internet creates is not a positive thing for Carr, but something that breeds distraction, a lack of focus, and shallowness—as opposed to the subtlety and nuance that is created by the type of reading that the printing press engendered. This passage asks the reader to act before it’s too late: to consider the impact of the Internet on our brains before we begin to take the consciousness that the Internet creates as simply natural or ultimately good.

“Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.”

Carr points out the lack of critical, intellectual, and scientific attention that the Internet receives—despite its extensive influence on both human life and thought. For Carr, the existing body of scholarship regarding the Internet does not go far enough in terms of examining the far-reaching effects of the Internet, and we have not developed enough of an ethical or moral standpoint regarding the Internet as we use it in an intellectually-passive manner. Carr is alarmed by this passivity and fearful about its effects.

“By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an ‘algorithm,’ we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.”

Carr details the plan for factory productivity that Taylor created, and conceives of this plan as a precursor to the way that developers now design algorithms that guide how people interact with the Internet. Tellingly, Carr emphasizes the dehumanizing effect of Taylor’s system, citing the factory workers’ feelings that Taylor’s system transformed them into automatons. Carr cites this purposefully, inviting the reader to question whether the Internet is doing the same thing—evacuating human activity of its personality and people of their independence by dictating that all should be done to increase efficiency.

“Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

For Carr, the increased efficiency that Taylor created is not something to be taken lightly—especially as his ideas, now taken mostly for granted, combine with the power of the Internet. For Carr, this combination has the potential of moving Taylor’s regimented system of human activity from the body to the brain. Carr invites his reader to take critical stock of the Internet’s profound impact upon the human brain before simply allowing this change to happen without any examination of its broad effects.

“[Google] has declared that its mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ It seeks to develop ‘the perfect search engine,’ which it defines as something that ‘understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.’ In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.”

In this passage, Carr asserts that Google’s mission represents the apotheosis of Taylor’s system. Carr’s summary and interpretation of the company’s mission casts Google as the ultimate factory boss—but now the factory is not an area zoned for work but our very human consciousness. Carr sees a danger in extending the logic of the factory to the workings of our brain: warning us that this process alarmingly flattens our intellectual lives into something systematized and commodified, rather than something experienced and developed with subtlety and toward the end of robust thought—not just productivity.

“Still, their easy assumption that we’d all ‘be better off’ if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.”

Carr questions the wisdom of Google’s founders. He questions whether we should passively accept the company’s belief that human beings are unquestionably better off with artificial intelligence assisting our brains. Carr asks the reader to dig deeper into the ethos that drives the powerful company and its ubiquitous technology of the search engine. Rather than passively accepting and using the search engine (and, by extension, the whole Internet) without criticality, Carr asks his reader to examine the ethical and intellectual framework that lies beneath the search engine.

“The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.”

Carr asks the reader to be aware that companies and advertisers can readily exploit the new neural language of the Internet to manipulate us into buying their products. By banking on a preexisting social suspicion of advertising, Carr hopes to make his appeal more intelligible and affecting: While many of his readers may not yet have dedicated critical attention to the effects of the Internet on their thinking and action, many of them probably have developed a general suspicion of advertising. By pointing out that the Internet is essentially wielded as an advertising machine by Google and others, Carr hopes to spur critical engagement with it.

“Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”

Carr is not arguing that the Internet will replace the fundamental building block of text—the alphabet. Instead, he’s careful to liken the Internet to the printing press, and to prognosticate its eventual replacement of the printing press. For Carr, this imminent replacement will have the effect of robbing humanity of the benefit of the written word on the page: namely, the benefit of slow, deliberate, and nuanced intellectual inquiry. For Carr, the breakneck pace and gaudy bells and whistles of the Internet rob the reader of the space and time to turn ideas and insights over in the mind.

“As we are drained of our ‘inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,’ Foreman concluded, we risk turning into ‘pancake people—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.’”

Carr emphasizes his belief that the Internet and its remodeling of the brain robs humanity of intellectual complexity, and has the potential to empty centuries of human knowledge of its nuance and intricacy. His envisioning of the human mind joined with artificial intelligence is dire. Far from the utopian vision that Google engenders, Carr’s perspective is marked by fatalism and a fear that the Internet is turning us into robots as we relinquish the intellectual and neurological legacy of the printed word in favor of increased efficiency regarding our accumulation—and, ultimately, consumption—of knowledge.