Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.

Is Google making us stupid: What the Internet is doing to our brains
by Nicolas Carr for The Atlantic

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.

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...

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. 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.

Carr observes that we may be reading more, but it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking:

... The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

I feel the same fuzziness and distraction, and I've been trying to write more as I am reading, in response to what I read, to reclaim the part of my brain that delved so deeply into books when I didn't have to sit in front of a computer eight hours a day. I am trying to write about anything, really, trying to produce something and stay all on one page in the mean time. And it's hard but I've been making this serious effort for a week and it's starting to get easier.

And this disturbed me, too:

[Google] has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

However ineptly you phrase your query, Google will understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. Doesn't this lead inevitably to a dulling of the mind, specifically a dulling of one's ability to be precise with language and meaning? Google's "smart" algorithms reward the sloppy thinker with speedy results, and it's dangerous to be sloppy with language and meaning. It leeches from the search box to what you think, what you say, and how you feel. I am reminded of Wendell Berry's "The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly." And we can only defend what we know and love and speak of particularly.

I think about Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology every single day, and I tremble. What are we losing as technology 'advances,' laying new claims to our time, thoughts and thinking, and lives? How is this shaping our minds, our most intimate human relationships, our politics, and our shared cultural life?