Serendipity35

Nicholas Carr wrote a piece in the new issue of The Atlantic called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" I had read a blog that mentioned it and so I walked right outside my office to the library periodicals. No issue available. Of course, a quick Google search brought up the online version of the article. That sets the tone for this post.

 

Carr admits that he is haunted by the scene at the end of Kubrick's film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey when the supercomputer HAL talks with astronaut Dave who is disconnecting the memory that is HAL's brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, "I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid."

Carr says he can feel it too. Like the astronauts who move robotically through their tasks on that ship "as if they're following the steps of an algorithm," he believes that Kubrick's theme (Let's give Clarke some credit too - they share screenplay credit and Arthur C. Clarke's book version explained a lot of the questions left after the film ended) is coming true: "As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."

 

Why blame Google? Nicholas Carr is the author most recently of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, and blogs at Roughtype.com. He starts by explaining the symptoms.

Over the past few years I have had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind is not "going," so far as I can tell, but it is changing. I am not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm 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 I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's 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 I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

And what is his explanation for this problem?

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve 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 I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets" reading 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 they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

I definitely don't agree with him that the "human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive." Still, I'm Googling for information on Carr and finding lots of others talking about this, and I do agree with parts of the argument. (I think I need to read his book to get the bigger take on this.) One opinion that I enjoyed reading was on the BBC News site. There, Bill Thompson jumps off from Carr's premise and takes a nice turn towards learning theory.

The Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget described two processes that he believed lay behind the development of knowledge in children. The first is assimilation, where new knowledge fits into existing conceptual frameworks. More challenging is accommodation, where the framework itself is modified to include the new information.

The current generation of 'search engines' seem to encourage a model of exploration that is disposed towards assimilative learning, finding sources, references and documents which can be slotted into existing frameworks, rather than providing material for deeper contemplation of the sort that could provoke accommodation and the extension, revision or even abandonment of views, opinions or even whole belief systems.

Perhaps the real danger posed by screen-based technologies is not that they are rewiring our brains but that the collection of search engines, news feeds and social tools encourages us to link to, follow and read only that which we can easily assimilate.

To get even more meta about all this, I then found (this is one advantage to being a slow blogger - I let ideas stew and by the time I get to them, there are so many other ideas to use) that Carr had also read the Thompson post and then commented:

Another interesting (and possibly related) psychological theory that I came across in researching the Atlantic article (but did not pursue) is that there are two very different modes of thought: exploration (finding new information) and exploitation (reflecting on or synthesizing information in order to come up with fresh ideas). It may be that the Net is increasing our incentives for exploration while decreasing our incentives for exploitation.

Accommodation and exploitation: good. Accommodation and exploration: bad. Okay, not that easy. Educators (at least those in K-12 or those who have had some educational theory) would be quick to connect to Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain. Running up that pyramid (or stairs, or hallway) from knowledge and comprehension to analysis and synthesis we all figure out after awhile that you can't have one without the other. Try asking students for analysis or synthesis on a topic they have no knowledge or comprehension of already.

But is the Net, represented in Nicholas Carr's argument by Google, actually changing the way our brain works? Is the process of getting information - that exploration - making it more likely that we will only assimilate that information into our existing frameworks?

If it is - and the jury hasn't even been selected on this decision - then what can educators do to help students exploit, evaluate and accommodate information for new purposes?

Back to Carr's article:

'The perfect recall of silicon memory,' Wired's 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."

I think his idea is actually one that has been around for quite some time. In earlier forms, it wasn't the Internet. It might have been television, or comic books, or movies. McLuhan was looking at all that and even he wasn't the first. Ultimately, what might be most important is that we ARE looking at these things and thinking about them.

I can still recall how cool I thought it was when I discovered that HAL the computer was called that because Clarke used the letters that came before I-B-M in the alphabet. IBM was the big brain in computing back then. How things change. We shouldn't be afraid of becoming like HAL. We need to worry about becoming automatons that can't disconnect the computer chips when necessary.

In fact, I think I'll stop typing and get some sleep. Tomorrow, I'll look for the print copy of that book.