Is ____(blank)____ Making Us ___(blank)__?

Is Google Making Us Stupid? (2008)

Carr, N. (July 01, 2008). Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Why you can't read the way you used to. The Atlantic Monthly, 56.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

When I read this article, I was able to relate it to several ideas, books, and references that I have read before. The good part was that this article is deep and succinct at the same time. After I read it, I thought about the structures and comparisons Carr uses to make his point. He uses, for example, a scene from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to describe how Google—I would say, the Internet, not just Google—has shaped him into an automaton, similar to the machines in the movie. Therefore, the question can be a little bit more precise, “Is Google Making Us Act Like Machines?” And the answer, according to what Carr describes, should be “YES.” However, Nicholas Carr, the “machine” produced/shaped by Google, still has the ability to manage and discuss metaphors and comparisons. I agree with him that we now read, think, and write with different tools and even different parts of our body—one or two thumbs for texting, the index for writing on a screen-touch application, or our voice, even our thoughts—instead of one hand. But, just as Marshall McLuhan would say, the cell phones, the iPhones and iPads are still extensions of our body.

Short, short, short.  Everything has to remain short and meaningful. Otherwise, readers will fly away to other sites.

In an effort to follow the idea of shortness, I will make a list of topics in Carr's article. My intention is to also mimic Nietzsche's aphorism-like writing after he got used to his typewriter:

• Reading War and Peace (long attention span) vs reading online (short and scattered attention span).
• “We are what we eat” becomes “We are what and how we read.”
• Friedrich Nietzsche and Nicholas Carr changed their way of thinking and writing after they acquired a new technology.
• The typewriter is similar to the computer.
• Deep, analytical thoughts versus short, shallow thoughts.
• The brain of a child is similar to the brain of an adult.
• The intellectual knowledge vs the intellectual technology.
• Frederick Winslow Taylor similar to the founders of Google.

Marshall McLuhan wrote in the 1960s that old tools and technologies are assimilated into new ones. This seems to be one of the main topics of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” We assimilate new technologies because we know the old ones. The question is not new either. We can actually drop “Google” and stick any technology in its place. Thus, writing, bookmaking, printing, mass-printing, cinema, radio, television, pop-culture, Windows, Apple, the Internet, Google, the iPhone, etc., can fit into this rhetorical question, “Is _____ (blank, usually something new) Making Us Stupid?” We can also change the “Stupid” part for fat, lazy, and other adjectives. This simple question, however, is as philosophical as “Who are we?” “Does God exist?” or “What is happiness?” etc. Carr remains skeptic and knows that it is probably too son to condemn Google for making pancakes out of our brains. But he also knows that we are facing a new way of writing or composing written language.

7 Things You Should Know About Collaboration (2009)

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutColla/182641

Collaboration tools, specifically the ones for tagging, intrigue me and make me think that we may be witnessing the birth of a new language, or languages. Tagging is basically marginalia, writing glosses. The Spanish language, for example, was born when the scribes from the Middle Ages wrote notes in a much clear Latin on the margins of a Latin codex called Emilianense. Those notes are the first written vestiges of what we know today as the Spanish language, and the glosses/tags are called “Glosas Emilianenses” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glosas_Emilianenses

I agree with “7 Things You Should Know About Collaboration” that tagging plugins have the risk of not running everywhere. When a great software or an online tool morphs or disappear--for example Shockwave or Flowgram ( http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/12/flowgram-was-cool-now-its-dead/ )--, a lot of our work has to change to new formats, which may result in loosing information, functionality, visual appeal, etc.

After Thought

After reading both Carr and the piece about collaboration, I thought about Ted Nelson, http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/, the first person to describe the Internet and several of the technologies we use now—Google Earth, Google books, collaboration tools, pages linked to other pages, the Apple time machine, etc. Nelson also coined the work hyperlink. In his book “Dream Machines,” he suggested a software that we can use to learn and work by adding, erasing, and commenting on different pages and documents. Nelson, who I consider to be one of the first philosophers of the Internet, also remains skeptical of what the Internet has become. He doesn't agree with the interface, the speed, etc.

We cannot avoid technology and become a world of Unabombers. Writing has helped passed knowledge from one one civilization to another; books have allowed literacy of the masses; the Internet lets remote places to connect with large cities, etc. In other words, I'm not as skeptical of the Internet and Google as Carr or Nelson are. But I do agree that we have to stop and think, continue and rethink.  We cannot loose the ability to ask ourselves if whatever is new ( the blank ) is changing us, not only if it's making us stupid.