This, for me, proved to be a slightly depressing essay. Mr. Carr's symptoms of the technologically-transformed brain, which he outlines toward the beginning of the article, most concerned me because I feel I've experienced some of them. Being born right on the cusp of the information age, I suppose I haven't truly known anything other than the Internet way of reading, but I can still say that I have a harder time maintaining focus when reading long texts than I used to. I couldn't imagine how late Baby Boomers' brains have been effected by the Internet reading style; they must be undergoing much more change than mine.
Mr. Carr explains that the Internet, with its hyperlinks and multiple-medium information, has essentially shortened our reading attention span. Over the last couple of years, our brains have been reprogrammed. They have become so accustomed to being able to access information instantly that keeping focus for traditional reading is much harder than before.
This, I would like to point out, is a difference in the way our brains now function. Mr. Carr, whether intentionally or otherwise, uses the adjective stupid in his title. While I agree with Mr. Carr that this change is not necessarily a good thing, it has nothing to do with our intelligence. Our brains are changing, not becoming stupider. I share the author's concern for the consequences of this transformation, but I resent the author's direct connection between how a brain functions and how well a brain functions.
I was most interested in the author's summary of past changes in communication styles and how they affected the way humans operate. It seems that each new invention opened a new Pandora's Box. Information would become progressively easier to access but our brain would change how it functions. This is the case with the Internet as well. Information is literally at our fingertips, and we have rapid access to it, but the trade-off is that using older methods of acquiring new information become more of a struggle.
The author sees this correlation. Mr. Carr worries about the end of the pattern more than the pattern itself. He brings up the example of Google's dream of creating a form of artificial intelligence as this end to the pattern. Carr feels that when it reaches this point, when the computer knows what information we want better than we do, we have have changed our brains too many times. At this point, the computer has become more essential to accessing information than our own brain. The author feels that the changes this would have on our brain are not worth the improved efficiency of information availability--and I would agree.
Great post. I like how you said, "our brains are changing, not becoming stupider." I was getting a bit angry at this author by the time I finished the essay. I resent being called stupid, thank you very much. I am now scared of Google, wanting to create an artificial intelligence so we have all the information we could ever want in our heads. I agree 100% that this is not worth the sacrifices. The last thing I want is to be a mindless machine.
ReplyDeleteI, too, like how you pointed out that our brains are functioning differently as opposed to becoming stupider. My viewpoint is that throughout the history of man, our minds have been changing given our current environment. The invention of languages have changed the way we think, as well as the invention of the printing press has enabled mass amounts of people to read.
ReplyDeleteI think that this is just another direction we are taking. In the world we live in today, we are pretty much forced to scan through things and just dump info we don't need in order to provide the most efficient services we can. While there is a limit to how far this should go, I'm not sure if we have reached that point just yet, though we are getting closer and closer.