Is Google making us dumber or smarter?

The article Is Google Making Us Stupid? What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains appears in the July/August issue of the Atlantic. As explained in the Good Morning Silicon Valley post Things that make you go "hmm...", the author, Nicholas Carr, is asking whether "with the advent of Google and the Internet and the instant availability of information, we are losing our ability to concentrate and think deeply." Although Carr offers some interesting observations, I think he's wrong about key things -- so I've got some questions for him.

Recently I wrote about online reading habits (see If the medium is the message, then we gotta start presenting evidence differently.) -- surprise, surprise, empirical studies show we tend to skim online more than read lengthy passages (and yes, I am doing my best to keep this post short). Carr provides anecdotal evidence that people are less inclined to do the "deep reading that used to come naturally". He reviews a recently published study of online research habits suggesting 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... 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. ...'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.'"

Question: Do we have solid evidence that back in olden times (say, the 1980s) people were more inclined to *actually read* entire books or articles? I confess that I often didn't (though I suppose it was harder then to bounce from once piece to another). And as a former educator, I'm certain many of my pre-Internet students bounced from one reference to another, judging from the research plans they shared with me.

Carr also writes about how the tools we use influence what words we write -- for instance, when Nietzsche switched from longhand to typing, his friends observed that his “prose changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” (That Nietzsche would have been one heck of a blogger.) And Carr provides a brief history of the industrial revolution and Frederick Taylor's scientific management -- comparing that to how we use the Internet, saying "What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind." But here's where his thesis begins to fall apart: He says that "In Google’s world ...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.... It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

Question: Has Carr actually been on the Internet -- say, to read a significant blog or view photos documenting a historic development? I see people online becoming highly engaged with ambiguous things, often gaining the "opening for insight" Carr says is merely a "bug to be fixed" -- maybe people jump around, but they get multiple points of view in a very short time, and gather up lots of food for thought.

Question: Has Carr made the distinction between so-called pure and interpreted information? Where pure stuff is concerned (for example, the temperature in San Jose, CA right now), ambiguity *is* a bug to be fixed. When I go to Google and enter "continental 1424," I want to know the status of Continental Airlines Flight 1424 to Mexico City -- nothing very ambiguous about that. But when we're dealing with information that's highly subject to human interpretation (such as for evidence-based management), the Google folks aren't so arrogant as to think it's fixable like a software bug. Carr should be more specific in saying what he means. Google & Co. aren't ruining our brains by making it easy to get basic info.

Finally, Carr closes by talking about the HAL computer in the movie 2001 -- saying the human "thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.... 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." Question: Can we place a moratorium on gloom-and-doom references to HAL?