The Haunted and the Haunters; Or, The Web and the Brain
In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, published in the July/August edition of The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr poses the question whether the internet changes the way we think. His starting point is an uncanny observation that might be as familiar to you as it is to me. Over the past years, Carr noticed that it is getting more difficult for him to get engaged in concentrated, “deep reading” of content that spans over several pages. Carr links this to the way information is presented on the web – basically in short snippets – a trend that is mirrored by other media such as blogs, print newspaper, and television.
“And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
While our ability to scan, perfunctorily decipher, and temporarily combine information is waxing, our ability to interpret the world using a culturally inherited knowledge seems to be waning.
A very impressing article.
It reminded me of a poem by Paul Celan.
Ein Dröhnen: es ist
die Wahrheit selbst
unter die Menschen
getreten,
mitten ins
Metapherngestöber.
I could not find an English translation, here my own approximation:
A droning: it is
truth itself
kicked amongst
humankind
right into the
drift of metaphors.
