Nick Carr: What IT does to Brain Matter

Well, this is a relief and depressing all at once.

Nick "Why IT doesn't Matter" Carr tells us he's noticing a change in his cognitive abilities. He thinks it's hsi heavy use of teh interwebz. I can sympathize: my list of 30-pages-read books has grown freakishly huge and there must be 300 incomplete posts in the drafts folder of Fouroboros Worldwide. (Yeah, the scarcity of posts these last 24 months ain't only from other kinds of busyness.)

The depressing thing? It's kids and grown-ups; how all the parallels of "surfing" and complexity-flight extend far beyond the toobz. This year's pundit term of choice is "Low-information Voter." Next, we get Low-information Student and No-information Worker. More on this later (if I can muster the concentration.) Anyway, here's a bit of Carr...

clipped from www.theatlantic.com I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

[Update:] Kevin Kelly weighs in here

Carr begins his piece describing how smarter he is while using Google. What if Carr is right? What if we were getting dumber when we are off Google, but we were getting loads smarter while we were on Google? That doesn't seem improbable, and in fact seems pretty likely.

Well, "smarter" is not the same as augmented. I'd bicycle faster and longer with an O2 cylinder and mask along for the ride. Funny, but if I have to trade autonomy and nimbleness for the umbilical ball and chain of a Google-boosted library of categories and events, well... am I smart enough to realize maybe I'm not so free or smart anymore?