http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
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Nicholas Carr is upset and not staying quiet any longer. In Is Google Making Us Stupid?, a recent article published in The Atlantic, he mourns his inability to enjoy long texts the way he once did before the Internet, which he blames. He admires the Internet, but feels that it may get out of hand if its influence reaches any further. And it may have already extended its reach too far to stop its advancement.
Beginning with a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Carr explains that Google’s ability to obtain any information with the click of a button has shortened society’s attention span. He remembers a time when long essays and books consumed readers’ thoughts, giving them the ability to completely submerge themselves in the text. He laments the loss of the love of reading and believes the problem stems from the Internet, referencing his friends’ and other professional writers’ struggle with long content. Even Nietzsche’s style of writing changed when he acquired a typewriter, but Carr believes the Internet is completely refiguring the way we read, write, and even think. The creators of Google envision an Internet similar to HAL in Stanley Kubrick's thriller, but Carr does not think we should be connecting artificial intelligence to human intelligence, especially when human thought is at a loss. Nicholas Carr appeals to the readers’ logos throughout most of the article, but I feel that his strongest point is that the Internet’s ability to gratify audiences so quickly will destroy a certain aspect of art: silence and patience.
By appealing to readers’ reason, Carr is consistent, using evidence to support his claims that the Internet is a detriment to society’s reading habits. He supports his angle of vision by pleading to his readers, asking them if they feel the same (and knowing that they do). It makes sense that longer passages have become less popular since the Internet’s explosion, and he understands it, but although society is always looking for better, there are oftentimes unforeseen casualties accompanied with what we consider progression. In this case, Carr is referring to books and articles, the best of which are often inadvertently cut out with the fat. People frequently do not even notice.
While most of Carr’s argument is rational, he does reference art once and it seems to me that it is his strongest point. Movies, music, and all other art forms are, in my opinion, best when they leave something for the viewer to figure out. Unfortunately, society’s distaste for deep thought has transformed previously artistic endeavors into instantly gratifying enterprises. A good example would be David Sedaris, a very popular author right now, whose writing style is short, to the point, and chock full of quick laughs. Although I myself am a fan of Sedaris, his format for stories is a new-age compilation of short essays and social commentaries, similar to blogs seen on the Internet. His technique is nothing similar to Herman Melville, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or even J.D. Salinger. Again, I enjoy Sedaris’ writing but it would seem that his style is exactly what Carr is complaining about in his article. “[Carr’s] mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving streams of particles. Once [he] was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now [he] zips along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Long, in-depth books are no longer what sell or what people want to read anymore, and the overabundance of small, swiftly satisfying stories have made even the book lovers, such as Carr, unable to dip below the surface.
Many of my friends and I feel the effects of the Internet, constantly chastising ourselves for not discussing anything of any real merit or quality, rather we resort to conversing about blogs, online videos, and whatever cover stories Yahoo is running that day. Many of us even read the blog of a famous rapper, Kanye West, who never posts anything of substance and his social commentaries are always shallow, but since he is a renowned celebrity, his opinion is valued by us, the college kids. “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.” Though the act of reading Kanye’s blog is injurious enough to our reading habits, we further the damage by discussing it, indulging ourselves further in to substance-less muck.
The Internet is reshaping us, molding us into nothing more than consumers. “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.” Facebook, for example, checks what websites its users browse frequently and post advertisements on their page accordingly. Our intelligence is losing its human nature and turning into a big blob of random information, unable to form a singular competent thought. Carr makes some very strong points about his perception of the Internet, but he seems hypocritical, since his article is available online. He complains about shorter articles and blogs that are so to-the-point, there is no art left in writing. But it would seem he is contributing to the problem. Although many of his sentences are long, detailed, and full of information, almost every paragraph begins or ends with a short and simple summary of the section to catch the skimmers. “Maybe I’m just a worrywart,” he states at the beginning of one subsection, then he goes on to explain in detail why that is. He is attempting to attract the very readers he seems to have disdain for, because he fears that he too may be becoming one of them. He cannot control The Atlantic, and has little to do with the fact that an online version exists which mirrors the print, but The Atlantic too takes advantage of Google, bloggers, podcasts, streaming video, and everything else Carr feels is harmful to readers.
Sedaris’ stories are well-written, as are Carr’s, and though they can both be easily skimmed, I, along with many others, enjoy reading them. They are not however nearly as in depth as what most high-schools and colleges consider literature. My thoughts on the subject matter are difficult to interpret in my head, because I have a blog, I write short stories, and I often wonder, “Who am I to question David Sedaris?” But although I may be contributing to the problem (or perhaps merely a product of it), I cannot help myself from wondering how it has become this way. The bottom line, however, is that whatever gets people reading, be it Melville or Sedaris, is good enough. The real reason this is happening to music, to movies, and to books is that they all have to sell. All of these forms of art have a business behind them and it is that business, the drive to make whatever sells, which contributes to the transformation of all of these art forms.
A summary of this article is available here.
xO
