Read Nicholas Carr’s piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid” (in Week 6). As you read, consider the objective(s) of the piece. What does the author want readers to think about? Who is the audience? Why does the author structure the piece in this specific way? Can you locate the thesis (a brief explanation of the purpose of the reading)? How does the reading challenge the audience? What are the most and least engaging parts of the reading? Why?

After completing the reading and considering the above questions, you will write two paragraphs: 1) a summary of the reading and 2) a response to the reading in which you discuss your feelings about Carr’s piece.

More in This Series

See Project

GUY BILLOUT

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer
HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly
poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman,
having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is
calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain.
“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that
someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural
circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but
it’s changing. I’m 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.

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.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of
the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The
advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information
are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “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’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and
acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar
experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on
long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the
phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed
that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to
be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the
answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read
has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has
changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has
described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally
lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote
earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of
Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone
conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality,
reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I
can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a
blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and
psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use
affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted
by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst
of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program,
the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two
popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K.
educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other
sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a
form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning
to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages
of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d
save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.
The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed
there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power
browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for
quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the
traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-
messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the
1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of
reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of
the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental
psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and
Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of
reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all
else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when
an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose
commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of
information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that
form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into
our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic
characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other
technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important
part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that
readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is
very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs
an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those
that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of
visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of
the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed
works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen
Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a
page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He
had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it
up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-
typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers.
Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a
composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had
become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even
take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his
“‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of
our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar
Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from
thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental
meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside
our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers
have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who
directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says
that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections
and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself
on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—
the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably
begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came
into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and
Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock
“disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent
world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided
time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the
scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist
Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason:
From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the
widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the
older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis
for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep,
to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing
metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock
arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in
the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But
the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our
brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper
published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital
computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be
programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And
that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing
system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our
map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our
telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It
injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws,
and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A
new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the
latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse
our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s
minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to
adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-
up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule
summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March
of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every
edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the
“shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them
the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old
media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such
broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been
written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s
reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man
named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in
Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the
efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he
recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking
machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of
the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and
then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise
instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work.
Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned
them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial
Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight
industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by
manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking
maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used
time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their
workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of
Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method”
of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb
throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual
labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of
industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has
been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial
manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and
software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern
the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and
automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions
of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—
to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge
work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the
Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google,
says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science
of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the
terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it
carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review,
and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find
information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand,
Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and
make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search
engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and
gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of
commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial
efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract
their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded
Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak
frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a
HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate
search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few
years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a
2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s
information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than
your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that
Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes
with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in
their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to
use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been
solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why
wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were
supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a
belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps
that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter
when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is
not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated
computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not
only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model
as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view
—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information
about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial
Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we
flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies
want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their
economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress,
there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s
Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people
came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry
inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease
to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to
“receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be
thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They
would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t
wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was
shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve
to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not
wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of
teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy
availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious”
and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets
would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and
spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes,
“Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.”
But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the
printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of
the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive,
data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal
wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the
printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading
that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we
acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off
within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted
reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our
own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep
reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something
important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright
Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was
the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and
articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a
personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.
[But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex
inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of
information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman
concluded, 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.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the
computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit
after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can
feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of
innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that
characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an
almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re
following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so
machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the
essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our
understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial
intelligence.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to
letters@theatlantic.com.

TECHNOLOGY

Is Google Making Us Stupid?
What the Internet is doing to our brains
N I C H O L A S C A R R J U LY/AU G U S T 2 0 0 8 I S S U E

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