reading response 2

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google making us stupid?”, he slows down the rapid tempo of our digitally-bound lives, and the never-ending crescendo of technological progress, for a moment, to unravel the unwitting changes going on in our heads, which he believes, are a result of our partially unhealthy relationship with technology . The main claim of his argument, is that by frequently interfacing our malleable and plastic-like brains with the Internet, a system of information exchange so overwhelming in speed and quantity, our brains are actually beginning to rewire their circuitry to the way this system processes information. That is to say, our pre-technology ethic of deeply reading a single text, has been exchanged so that we can read for speed and quantity, covering countless headlines and facts rapidly, to get the “gist“ of as much information as possible in as short a time. Psychologist Maryanne Wolf suggests in the article, “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.“ This is because the brain prunes circuits that go unused, so if we persistently read lots of information in this shallow quick way, the synaptic connections for deeper reading drop off. In a study, by scholars at the University College London, confirmed that the new way we digest information is by “a form of skimming activity, hopping from one source to another.“ Carr asserts, that technology has been forcing these reality-altering changes in our minds since the invention of timekeeping devices, and he tries to show us that our minds are being increasingly supplemented with this form of intelligence, and maybe even one day, to his fear, supplanted by it. I think in writing this essay, his motivation was to convince his audience not to be complacent about the integrity of their minds, especially around the influence of unquestioned goods, like the usefulness of the internet, because an over-reliance on these things could spell a great price at the end of the day.

This leads me to what I think is probably the second most significant claim in his article, which is important because it brings his essay full-circle. He first makes a claim about the ongoing effect of technology on our cognition, and then makes another about the history of these changes. Now he predicts the future, “The internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition.” I think this is a forewarning, when you consider the way he begins his article with a doomsday scenario from a SciFi movie. We have all seen how much the internet can change in two short decades, and the increasing effect it can have on our minds and world. But the possibilities of what the internet could be like in a century or a millennium are not fathomable, and as the power of the Internet and its grip on our physical world rapidly increases, so the possibilities and implications on our cognition will prove near limitless, i.e., uploading consciousness onto digital hardware, immortality, etc. These far-reaching possibilities he talks about are grounded in the reliability of technology’s progress having always been self-sustaining, and as Carr states, “a digital computer could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies.“ One of the reasons why his claim about the far-reaching implications of the future Internet is so significant, while traveling in the same vein of his skepticism, is because in the future it might be borderline omniscient and omnipotent. It will not merely compromise our attentions spans, it could potentially be one of the greatest threats to mankind, as artificial intelligence is increasingly infused with it, and we draw closer to a technological singularity. I can’t help but think of the analogy in the article about the industrial revolution in the early 20th century, and how the Internet is being modeled off that same scientific design of efficiency. The Industrial Revolution also played a significant enabling role in producing the bloodiest century of the planet, probably more bloody than all the others combined. Which makes me wonder if someday the Internet could not also play a comparable role, if people or AI, in some way, learn to exploit it to such an end. In the movie 2001, which Carr references, technology is developed by man to serve him as a tool, but the tool eventually becomes improved upon so many times in intelligence and ability, that it is more capable of improving upon itself than its own creator, and therefore, it sees its creator as a potential obstacle in his further evolution, as the creator still lays demands against it. This is intriguing, because the movie portrays this conflict as being unavoidable, and that either man or man’s tools will be victorious one day. A less apocalyptic fear might be that the internet will simply be so consuming and pervasive in the future, that humans will be sapped of cognition, and full of technological ability, which is a volatile combination. Or maybe, just that the human character of life will simply evaporate under the weight of our infatuation with processing power. Either how, I think this hits on Carr’s underlying concerns and primary motivation for writing this article.