by Ethan Johnson
June 17, 2008

Whenever I would subject myself to a friendly game of chess with my father, I knew I was in deep trouble when, after a long, stonefaced silence, he would exhale and murmur, "okay, I'll be a sucker." Checkmate was sure to follow in short order.

Such is my ultimate reaction to Nick Carr's magnum opus that is making the rounds, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" For the afflicted out there, I'll summarize and then expound: No, but we are meant to think so.

Now for the hot air.

Here is my novel, utterly original thought that has been tossing about in my mind for several days: There is no history. None. Ah, but what about [whatever historical event that is backed up with oodles of proof]? Never happened. Unless it is happening today, in which case the current event is exactly that, completely unprecedented, and uncharted territory that begs to be trod upon lightly or not at all, or resolutely trampled down by the bravest of pioneers.

Which is a fancy way of saying, "my, aren't I clever that I recently finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (1985)!" And of course, freshly equipped with a literary hammer, I find myself surrounded by rhetorical nails.

Now for the serious analysis of Carr's points.

Carr laments his own reduced capacity for "deep thought", and seeks out the culprit:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Okay, problem defined, but what then, is the root cause?

I think I know what’s going on. 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. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets — reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

In so many words (and many more that I will not blockquote here), Carr blames his use of the personal computer and by extension the Internet, which has immersed him in what Postman called the "culture of distraction." The popular Internet wasn't woven into our collective consciousness back then, so Postman's bugaboo is television. I am tempted to say that Postman could not have imagined what havoc the Internet would later wreak, but I suppose that's irrelevant. 1+1=2, no matter how you dress it up, such as x+y/z=2. If you were driven hopelessly to distraction in 1985 (which I will remind the reader never happened - they year or the supposed acts within), then 2008 is probably "business as usual" for you - perhaps more so, what with the text messages, the Blackberry in hand, the Twittering, the instant messaging, the status message updates, the web feeds, and blah, blah, blah.

While Carr blames Google in part for his "wayward brain", Postman blames the ills of modern society on what he calls the "news of the day." I think a great many of us are captive to this phenomenon. In short, the "news of the day" is for practical intents and purposes irrelevant to you and your immediate sphere of influence, but you devote X amount of attention to such news and even work in into daily conversation. For example:

• Tim Russert died.
• Big Brown did not win the Belmont Stakes.
• It's raining here in Plano Texas today.

The logical response to all of these items is, "yes, and...?" Why is the weather I'm experiencing relevant to a reader in France? Why is Big Brown's failure to win a horse race relevant to anyone who didn't have a vested interest in the outcome? And yet, we want to know, we want to know now, and we want to talk to people all about what we think of everything.

Postman claimed that there really weren't any opinions being expressed in 1985, but more accurately, reactions. We plugged-in folk have surrounded ourselves with a myriad of distractions, providing us with the news of the day, to which we might react. We say "opine" when we react, but if the Supreme Court issued an opinion like we "opine", many rulings would boil down to "well, screw that!"

I say this because unlike other afflicted souls, I find that I can indeed read a book at length, without falling victim to ADD or similar and find it impossible to sit still for 5 minutes. Of course, for as plugged-in as I am with online shenanigans, I'm far from plugged-in. Not like some.

What I do find is that the Internet and tools like Google enhance my offline reading. I just finished a book that talked about the Maryland SoccerPlex and tried to paint a "word picture" about how immense the facility is. I made a mental note, and next time I was online I did indeed use Google to find the site, and found a picture that depicts the sheer mass of the facility. It's that huge that they don't have comprehensive aerial photos, only drawings. Some years ago (aha, you caught me - they never existed), I would have had to seek out this information using archaic methods by today's standards, such as walk to a library and hope a book or other reference material was available to satisfy my curiosity.

This also meant that I had to sock away mental notes for later retrieval when the opportunity arose. I once flipped through a library book about the Disney classic Fantasia and was struck by the volume of conceptual work that went in to the production of the film. I didn't see the actual movie until several years later, but recalled some of the book material and was somewhat underwhelmed with the finished product - even knowing what little I knew going into it. These days (the only days, of course), I suppose I could read a blog post about Fantasia and the movie might be a click away at an online video repository. And the video would be surrounded with "related links" and "other videos I might enjoy" along with comments pro and con, which distracts from the movie, and provides an outlet to gauge popular "opinion" about the film, and thus free me up to experience other online wonders, and react accordingly.

One of the fundamental principles of computer programming is "garbage in, garbage out." The Internet and the personal computer are what we make them, and we benefit or suffer from their use as we benefit and suffer from anything else. The people who have come forward to confess their limited attention spans and "wayward brains" have created an atmosphere of distraction for themselves, and now lament their inability to pay attention or think deeply.

And attention is what Nick Carr sought with his article, hence the provocative title. Stupid is as stupid does, as the saying goes, and regardless of Google's desire to crank out something akin to Artificial Intelligence, what is getting lost in the sensationalism is the fundamental truth that there is a difference between information and knowledge, knowledge and wisdom, knowing and doing. My computer's operating system is equipped with a calculator and dictionary. While capable of producing factual information, they do not replace critical thought. If they ever do, well, that's just stupid.

And to underscore all of the above, nothing in this entire exercise has served to assist me in my quest for gainful employment. This, my friends, is checkmate. <EM>