It's Not Just Google That's Making Us "Stoopid"

Nicholas Carr's essay in the July/August Atlantic Magazine, Is Google Making Us Stoopid?, attempts to make the point that using the Web and hopping from link to link has changed the way we think -- that we are now less able to concentrate on and finish longer pieces of writing or work of any kind, even written content on the Web itself. We now grab a snippet of info and jump to the next somewhat-related snippet. Carr contends that our brains are actually working differently as a result -- they are "wired" differently. The essay's title singles out the Google search engine and environment as the culprit, but that's just a handle for his main argument that the Web is at the bottom of this supposed change.

That a medium of a communication influences the message and shapes the audience as it interacts with it is not a new observation. Carr got 5-6 magazine pages and a cover story out of this point. He offered only a few weak bits of anecdotal evidence to back it up.

My sense is, he is not wrong. But I think that if it is harder for us to concentrate, it's because we simply have less time to do so. A number of changes have occurred in the last forty years to fragment our attention, with less and less time available to us for us to apply that attention:

1. In most families, both parents work. With both adults working, household tasks get pushed into the evenings, where they compete with everything else that has to happen in the evening.
   
   
2. There are more single-parent families than ever, and families with divorced parents. Life is complicated in these families, with parents and children dealing with multiple schedules and connections to family members inside and outside the house.
   
   
3. The proliferation of media, including cable channels, DVDs, games, the Web, mobile phones. All of it competes for our attention, so we have to give all of it smaller and smaller bits.
   
   
4. The technological unification of work. Corporations can now cram more and more disparate tasks onto individual workers, and thus employ fewer workers. A corporate worker with a computer has the tools of dozens of different professionals.

In each of these changes, don't we see the same pressures to fragment our attention that Carr writes about in his essay? We have more and more things to do in the twenty four hours of every day.