Stupider or smarter? You be the judge.
Few people tell it like Stowe Boyd.
This weekend, Boyd added his considerable insight to a fascinating discussion that has grown out of Nick Carr’s provocative Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Later, Scott Karp added his wealth of insight, and now Boyd. It’s a complex topic but boils down to Carr’s question about what’s happening with our his mind these days. He feels his mind shifting and doesn’t like it. Do yourself a favor and read all of the link references, beginning with Carr’s.
Karp elaborates on Carr’s premise by discussing the differences between absorbing knowledge in big chucks versus little chucks, and Boyd agrees with Karp that the answer to Carr’s question is a resounding “no.”
As I have been saying for years, the inherent conservatism of the mass media and other mass organizations (those that are based on one:many modes of communication, like government, religions, business, and so on) will lead them to say that this new sort of thinking is illegitimate: they war against it, saying that our new ways of talking and thinking and the social structures that they engender are bad, inferior, immoral, and stupid; and that those in favor of this web revolution are dumb, misguided, or evil fringe lunatics.
This is exactly the nut of the thing for me, too, but my take has always been the shift from the modernist, colonialist, hierarchical culture to the participatory, postmodernist, post-colonial culture. Traditionalists will love the concept of Google making people stupid, because it beautifully validates their illusions about knowledge and life and gives them a platform from which to point and say, “See? See?” It’s demagoguery, plain and simple, and I don’t believe for a minute that the cultural changes are “bad” for us. Does it make me feel uncomfortable? Perhaps, but that’s just fear of the unknown.
I’ve oft quoted my daughter Jenny, who at age seven got her first calculator (in the mid 70s). She asked me then, “If I have one of these, why do I need to study math?” Is she stupid, because her mind wants to explore other uses? If she uses her calculator, does that make her more stupid than one who doesn’t?
We’re always hearing how we humans only use 10 percent of our brains, but dammit, we sure seem to be comfortable with that. Why?
The ability to instantly deconstruct vastly complex arguments with a mouse click is certainly the enemy of a culture run by protected knowledge and absolute authorities, but it doesn’t follow that this means doom for humanity. Besides, cultural changes tend not to be “all or nothing,” so hierarchy of some form will always have its place.
