Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
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Illustration by Guy Billout
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. Dave, my mind is going, HAL says, forlornly. I can feel it. I can feel it.
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years Ive had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isnt goingso far as I can tellbut its changing. Im not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when Im 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 Id spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. Thats 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 Im always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know whats going on. For more than a decade now, Ive been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and Ive got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when Im not working, Im as likely as not to be foraging in the Webs info-thicketsreading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which theyre sometimes likened, hyperlinks dont merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and theyve been widely described and duly applauded. The perfect recall of silicon memory, Wireds Clive Thompson has written, can be an enormous boon to thinking. But that boon comes at a price. 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.
Im not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintancesliterary types, most of themmany say theyre having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader, he wrote. What happened? He speculates on the answer: What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. Im just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print, he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a staccato quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. I cant read War and Peace anymore, he admitted. Ive lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.
Anecdotes alone dont 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. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited a form of skimming activity, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source theyd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would bounce out to another site. Sometimes theyd save a long article, but theres no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of reading are emerging as users power browse horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But its a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinkingperhaps even a new sense of the self. We are not only what we read, says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. We are how we read. 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.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. Its not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. 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.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewritera Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsches friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom, the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his thoughts in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.
Also see:
Living With a Computer
(July 1982)
"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows
You are right, Nietzsche replied, our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts. Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsches prose changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that thats not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind is very plastic. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The brain, according to Olds, has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our intellectual technologiesthe tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacitieswe 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.
The clocks methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality. In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating like clockwork. Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating like computers. But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brains plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And thats what were seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. Its becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Nets image. It injects the mediums 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 were glancing over the latest headlines at a newspapers site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Nets influence doesnt end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As peoples minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audiences new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the shortcuts would give harried readers a quick taste of the days news, sparing them the less efficient method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our livesor exerted such broad influence over our thoughtsas the Internet does today. Yet, for all thats been written about the Net, theres been little consideration of how, exactly, its reprogramming us. The Nets intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plants machinists. With the approval of Midvales owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. 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 instructionsan algorithm, we might say todayfor how each worker should work. Midvales employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factorys productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylors tight industrial choreographyhis system, as he liked to call itwas embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the one best method of work and thereby to effect the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts. Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. In the past the man has been first, he declared; in the future the system must be first.
Taylors 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, Taylors 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 methodthe perfect algorithmto carry out every mental movement of what weve come to describe as knowledge work.
Googles headquarters, in Mountain View, Californiathe Googleplexis the Internets high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is a company thats founded around the science of measurement, and it is striving to systematize everything it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is to organize the worlds 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 Googles 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.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. The ultimate search engine is something as smart as peopleor smarter, Page said in a speech a few years back. For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence. In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, Certainly if you had all the worlds information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, youd be better off. Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidts words, to solve problems that have never been solved before, and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldnt Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that wed 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 Googles world, the world we enter when we go online, theres 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.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the networks reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Webthe more links we click and pages we viewthe 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 linkthe more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. Its in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe Im just a worrywart. Just as theres a tendency to glorify technological progress, theres a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Platos Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogues characters, cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful. And because they would be able to receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, they would be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. They would be filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom. Socrates wasnt wrongthe new technology did often have the effects he fearedbut he was shortsighted. He couldnt foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenbergs printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men less studious and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient. But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isnt 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 authors 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.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with content, we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described whats at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and cathedral-like structure of the highly educated and articulate personalitya man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of selfevolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the instantly available.
As we are drained of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, Foreman concluded, we risk turning into pancake peoplespread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Im haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computers emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronautI can feel it. I can feel it. Im afraidand its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HALs outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if theyre following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. Thats the essence of Kubricks dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
They are all stuck in a rut. But thus time around, couldn't pick up the new Kamila Shamsie book "Burnt Shadows".... the synopsis was outta this world.
These days xeric's signature is longer than his posts!!! And Elmo doesn't like it... how come he and many others write their dastaan-e-hayat in there and get away with it and Elmo goes even a full stop above and smack gets a message: You are only allowed three lines. Elmo seriously doesn't like it 
(no sarcasm or judgements only for pun plzz dont take offense)
