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

Thu Jun 19 08:11:55 EDT 2008

Is *it* lost? Perhaps it is just us struggling for balance whilst we  
juggle terabytes upon this mortal coil.

Your point, as well as a conversation I had earlier in the day, with  
my Head of English, brought forth a conversation I had many years ago  
- another lifetime, actually - amid a biodynamic vegetable patch on  
the island of Hawai'i with a preeminent botanist and Hawaiian elder, a  
woman every bit as humble as she was wise, concerning the arrival of  
the Christian missionaries to Hawai'i.

Steeling myself to rise upon my toes and dance through the matter of  
cultural imperialism, she suddenly disarmed me entirely by stating her  
position:  The peril of western religiosity was muted by their  
bequesting a writing system upon the archipelago. In her opinion, up  
to that point in the history of humankind, the burden presented by  
orally transmitting the accumulated knowledge of her ancestors had  
become so great a stress to the kahuna class of scholars that any sins  
due to Christian proselytizing ought rightly to be absolved by their  
blessing the Hawai'ian culture with literacy.

Put that in perspective. By definition, history is said to begin with  
the written record and yet writing came to Hawai'i in 1820. How many  
centuries of oral traditions had accumulated by that recent date  
amongst such an advanced people? Sure, we all teeter under the crush  
of email, data this, and data that, but it could be worse- at least  
it's other than *just* an oral crush ;-)

Carl

On Jun 19, 2008, at 12:05 PM, Tim Spalding wrote:

> 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
>>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/ 
> timspalding
>
>
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