Is Google Making Us Stupid

Con­trary to the title of this arti­cle, Nicholas Carr isn’t so much ask­ing if Google is mak­ing us stu­pid, but rather if Google mak­ing us think dif­fer­ently. The answer to this ques­tion is yes, and it echoes ear­lier sen­ti­ments by Neil Post­man who pointed out (about tele­vi­sion) that tech­nol­ogy is not neutral:

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.