Posts Tagged ‘carr’

The Britannica Blog is holding a forum on Nick Carr’s recent piece in The Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Most of the debate surrounding the piece is rather disappointingly superficial - much like the original provocation which relies heavily on Carr’s personal experience. Carr is a smart thinker who has a firm grasp on technology and its role in society, but he is also a pessimist who thinks the march of technology is bringing humanity into a nightmarish scenario. In his article for The Atlantic, he ponders the possibility that the Internet is rewiring our brain to value the brevity of blogs instead of the long writing of books. He writes, “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 do think that the medium of information can influence the way in which we interact with it, but placing a value judgment on such a new medium (and probably any medium) is a rather pointless exercise. Sure, the Internet may favor brevity, but it isn’t making us stupid. Look at John Battelle’s wonderful refutation:

“Carr may believe that search and the Internet make us stupid, but I will counter his personal, anecdote-driven conclusions with one of my own: when I am deep in search for knowledge on the web, jumping from link to link, reading deeply in one moment, skimming hundreds of links the next, when I am pulling back to formulate and reformulate queries and devouring new connections as quickly as Google and the Web can serve them up, when I am performing bricolage in real time over the course of hours, I am “feeling” my brain light up, I and “feeling” like I’m getting smarter. A lot smarter, and in a way that only a human can be smarter.”

But, like I said, very little of this debate interests me since so much of it was link-baiting sensationalism. One piece of the Britannica forum did catch my fancy, though. Larry Sanger, the guy who sorta invented Wikipedia, has a response entitled “In Defense of… the Individual Thinker” where he references a paper he wrote about scientific collaboration. Sanger’s essay did devolve into an almost embarrassing personal critique of Clay Shirky and much of the thoughtfulness was lost amidst his sarcasm.

There is, though, an interesting point to be made:

“some of us read popular science books written by Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, and Steven Pinker because of the specific, individual perspectives they bring to their subjects.”

The tendency isn’t limited to science: for a long time, I made a habit of reading nearly everything Larry Lessig had to say. I valued his opinion, knowledge and insight into the topic of interest we shared, copyright. Plenty of people follow Jon Stewart because of the same reasons. Sanger seems to think that we have to read someone’s writings at length to understand them, but, then again, I would have never read Lessig’s three books or watched his lengthy speeches if he did not have a compelling Twitter-sized summary. The same goes for Sanger and his beloved Tolstoy.

If an idea is of worth, it will be consumed in full. Worthy ideas break down into bite sized pitches, so even in a world of links and tweets, people will still find War and Peace (a clear statistical outlier, as far as book lengths go).

And, as for the importance of individual thinkers, well, I don’t think it should be overstated. While Lessig or Hawkings break intellectual ground, they stand on the shoulder of giants. The individual thinkers who both Sanger and I value are only incremental improvements in a vast field of knowledge. And it is that vast field of knowledge which truly propels humanity forward.

Update: Just stumbled upon some thoughts by Cory Doctorow on a medium’s “cognitive style” - the type of use it induces.