Nicholas Carr on the Modern Capacity for Contemplation

In his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? (The Atlantic, July/Aug 2008), Carr contemplates what the Internet Age could be doing to the modern human mind.

He begins with a general sense that he can't sink his teeth into deep reading the way he did as a younger man, and he wonders if his difficulties reading deeply may correlate to an inability to think so deeply as he once did. Studies show that most internet users seem to skim content. He mentions the work of Maryanne Wolf, who says that internet reading typically turns humans into "mere decoders of information." He sites the way the use of a typewriter tightened Nitzsche's writing style.

Carr continues with a short discussion of Daniel Bell's sociological theory of "intellectual technologies," which recalls Marshall McLuhan's sentiment that technology extends the ability of humans to gather information, but promptly subverts it, stating that people are also changed by key technologies that they incorporate into their everyday lives. But the computer is more multi-functional than previous key devices (clock, television), and therefore the effects of it on our plastic brains is especially difficult to predict. Carr thinks that the mutability of computer performance may therefore lead to a scattering of our attention and a diffusion of our concentration.

Carr goes on to remind us of the forerunner of our modern systems analysts, Frederick Winslow Taylor. It becomes all too clear that the author worries about something being lost in all this efficiency. Wasn’t it cool to ruminate over deep ideas and thrill at the opportunity to discuss them with other well-spoken intellectuals? Isn’t the aim of search engines to make knowledge as easy to obtain and as quick to make as a 1960’s tv dinner?

And I find myself thinking, with a sigh in my own cynicism, “And can rumination and deep thinking grow a business quickly?” America in the twentieth century has been obsessed with the path to a quick dollar or a quick fix to a problem. That has been a cultural pathway for some time. That it has finally reached our intellectuals seems like a testament to technology products that can successfully supplement human intelligence, extending our recall abilities.

Personally, I think the Internet is a tool. Like any tool, it only has an impact on its user to the extent that the user allows that tool to control him or her. Human nature may be to take the easiest, least painful path of least resistance, but with the ability to reason comes the choice of how to use the tools available to us. There has to be a balance, and, with any luck, we’ll find it in the coming decades.