A question for our times

A question for our times

“Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet it doing to our brains” by Nicholas Carr is a fascinating articulation of what many of us have dreaded about the digital age. It’s why many of us purist readers who need to hold the newspaper or book in our hands have dreaded the onslaught of the Internet. The article is printed in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Whether you agree or not with the concerns, as journalists and other professionals responsible for the dissemination of information, we would be wise to look at how the Internet is changing the way we process information.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but as a reporter covering education and government, I have harbored the same concerns about what the Internet is doing to the way we process information. There’s just too much of it! And how do we put it all in context?

In the article, Carr says, “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.” He cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist, and others’ concerns that the “media or other technology we use in learning to read play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.”

And I thought it was just me! I thought the chipping away of my capacity for concentration and contemplation was just a sign of my advancing age!

Educators in the schools that I cover today are beginning to question why they should invest in teaching the alphabet, or even teaching handwriting to kindergarten and first graders, when it is assumed by most that everything will be done on a computer. So why invest the time and staff? Teach them keyboarding as early as possible! Parents are actually complaining that handwriting and spelling and all those skills are unnecessary for tomorrow’s workforce and are a waste of taxpayer money.

Carr concludes with a frightening picture of society: that we will be so overloaded with snippets of information (whether important or not) “we risk turning into pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

We see it already in the media. The 30 second sound bite or video shot is now the 10 second sound bite or video. The 20 inch story is now the 10 inch story, with bigger pictures. We are losing our ability to focus our thought.

I also worry that with this inability to focus and the modification of our neural circuitry, we lose the ability to put things in the context of memory, allow our imaginations to make associations and allow us to reflect upon how those words are affecting us, allowing us to feel our emotions.

This is what worries me most: Is the instant and constant information creating a society unable to connect to ourselves and one another emotionally? Will the removal of our tactile senses by reading on a computer screen and writing using the keyboard strip away part of our very humanity?