[Platform] "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" - The Atlantic

[Larry Ely]

Platform,
Following article is from this URL.  This is an important read to help us 
see what the computer and email are doing to us, to our equilibrium, to our 
sociablity and tolerance.
Larry

<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google>http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google 



Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Atlantic, July/August 2008

"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 going­so far as I 
can tell­but 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-thickets­reading 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 
<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_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 acquaintances­literary types, most of them­many 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 thinking­perhaps 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 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060186399/theatlanticmonthA/ref=nosim/>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 typewriter­a 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 
capacities­we 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 lives­or 
exerted such broad influence over our thoughts­as 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 instructions­an “algorithm,” we might say today­for 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 choreography­his “system,” as he liked to call 
it­was 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 
algorithm­to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe 
as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California­the Googleplex­is 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 people­or 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 
Web­the more links we click and pages we view­the 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 link­the 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 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0872202208/theatlanticmonthA/ref=nosim/>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 wrong­the new technology did often have the effects he feared­but 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 personality­a 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 self­evolving 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.