[Web4lib] "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains"

[Tim Spalding]

I got a couple "good point, Tim"s for that. But I'm not entirely
joking. Something *is* lost.

Human culture often advances by externalizing pieces of our mental
life—writing externalizes memory, calculators externalize arithmetic,
maps, and now GPS, externalize way-finding, etc. Each shift changes
the culture. And each shift comes with a cost. Nobody memorizes texts
anymore, nobody knows the times tables past ten or twelve and nobody
can find their way home from the stars and the side of the tree the
moss grows on. We advance by becoming dumber.

As a personal aside, I recognized the Google effect in my own life
some years ago. For two semesters back in college I wrote a thesis on
a topic—images of Ancient Greece in the Antebellum South—that required
me to visually scan large quantities of text, looking for classical
references. I speed-read 30 years of the _Southern Literary Messenger_
and countless book indexes.

In the end, I found my eyes could no longer hold a piece of text quite
right. They wanted to fly across it. It was hard to get back to normal
reading. I feel that the web today—particularly the absolute crush of
email I get—are doing the same thing to me.

Tim

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Tim Spalding <tim at librarything.com> wrote:
> Plato said much the same thing about the invention of writing :)
>
> "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they
> will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is
> written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within
> themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered
> is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom
> that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling
> them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to
> know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men
> filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be
> a burden to their fellows."
>
> T
>
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 9:03 PM, B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> And how about this similarly titled article: Will GPS make us dumb?
>>
>> http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5179471
>>
>> Bernie Sloan
>> Sora Associates
>>
>>
>> --- On Wed, 6/18/08, Michael <drweb at san.rr.com> wrote:
>>
>>> From: Michael <drweb at san.rr.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [Web4lib] "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains"
>>> To: web4lib at webjunction.org
>>> Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 6:29 PM
>>> Good paper for good discussion, as we are seeing on other
>>> library-related
>>> lists. I ran across this similar piece on the current
>>> infozeitgist from the
>>> "Washington Post":
>>>
>>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR2008061202258.html?referrer=emailarticle
>>>
>>> Brief excerpt:
>>> The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?
>>>
>>> The demise of orderly writing: signs everywhere.
>>>
>>> One recent report, young Americans don't write well.
>>>
>>> In a survey, Internet language -- abbreviated wds, :) and
>>> txt msging --
>>> seeping into academic writing.
>>>
>>> But above all, what really scares a lot of scholars: the
>>> impending death of
>>> the English sentence.
>>>
>>> Librarian of Congress James
>>> Billington<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/James+Billington?tid=informline>,
>>> for one. "I see creeping inarticulateness," he
>>> says, and the demise of the
>>> basic component of human communication: the sentence.
>>> --
>>> Michael aka DrWeb
>>> drweb2 at gmail.com
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 4:05 PM, B.G. Sloan
>>> <bgsloan2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> >
>>> > Here's a new article that might be of interest:
>>> >
>>> > Carr, Nicholas. Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the
>>> Internet is doing to
>>> > our brains. The Atlantic, 301(6), July/August 2008.
>>> > http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
>>> >
>>> > An excerpt:
>>> >
>>> > "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...what the Net seems to be doing is
>>> chipping away my capacity for
>>> > concentration and contemplation...Once I was a scuba
>>> diver in the sea of
>>> > words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet
>>> Ski."
>>> >
>>> > Bernie Sloan
>>> > Sora Associates
>>> >
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Web4lib mailing list
>>> Web4lib at webjunction.org
>>> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
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>



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