Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was written by Nicholas Carr. It was originally published in The Atlantic’s July/August 2008 issue. The essay stirred much debate, and in 2010, Carr published an extended version of the essay in book form, entitled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

The essay begins and ends with an allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the initial allusion, Carr summarizes the moment toward the end of the film in which “the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene [...] Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial ‘brain.’ ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says, forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.’” (1). Carr uses this allusion to assert that he, like HAL, has had a growing feeling that “someone, or something, has been tinkering with [his] brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” (2). He feels that his brain has changed the way it processes information and thinks. He finds it increasingly more difficult to read deeply and with subtlety, as he loses his concentration and gets distracted and restless while reading. He attributes this change to the increase in his use of the Internet.

Carr states that he’s not alone in this as the Internet quickly becomes a “universal medium” (4). While he concedes that the Internet has provided the gift of “immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information,” he also cites the media theorist Marshal McLuhan’s more complicated observation: “[M]edia are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought” (4). Carr asserts that “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (4). He then offers that many of his literarily-inclined friends are also observing a similar phenomenon in their own lives.

Carr points out that these anecdotes do not offer empirical proof of anything, and scientific experiments on “the long-term neurological and psychological” effects of the Internet have not yet been completed (7). However, he cites a recent study published by the University College of London that “suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think” (7). The college’s five-year study observed “computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information: “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited” (7). The authors of the study ultimately concluded that readers are not reading Internet materials the way that they would read materials in more traditional media—and that the Internet is creating a new paradigm of reading, “as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins” (7).

Carr observes that the proliferation of text on both the Internet and via text messaging has likely increased the amount that people read: “But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self,” he says (8). He then cites Maryanne Wolf, the developmental psychologist at Tufts University who wrote the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. He writes, “Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace” (8).

Carr then paraphrases some of Wolf’s ideas. He highlights her assertion that reading is not an instinctual human trait: “We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains” (9). He therefore concludes that the neural circuits created by human use of the Internet will inevitably differ from those created in previous eras when books and other printed media were the norm. He also offers an anecdote that supports this point: Friedrich Nietzsche switched from pen and paper to a typewriter for composing his writing in 1882. Nietzsche’s friend soon noticed that the man’s writing took on a different quality as a result—becoming “tighter” and “telegraphic” (11).

Carr reminds his reader of the plasticity of the human brain, asserting that even the adult human brain “routinely [breaks] old connections and [forms] new ones” (13). Carr then defines “intellectual technologies” as “tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities” (14). He says that “we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies” (14). He uses the invention of the clock to prove this point, citing the cultural critic Lewis Mumford to assert that the ubiquity of the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences” (14). Carr asserts that this phenomena helped bring “the scientific mind and the scientific man” into being—but that it also took something away: “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock” (15).

Carr asserts that this change extends beyond mere human action and into human biology and cognition. He cites the 1936 writings of Alan Turing, which predicted that the tremendous computing power of the digital computers would lead to their usurpation of preexisting forms of technology. Carr sees this happening as the Internet becomes “our map and clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” (17). Carr observes that “when the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image” (18). He cites The New York Times’ decision to “devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts” to provide print readers with a similar experience to Internet readers as an example of this phenomenon (17). He then asserts that no other form of media has had as powerful an influence over human thought than the Internet, and that we have not spent enough time poring over “how, exactly, [the Internet] is reprogramming us” (20). He concludes that “[t]he Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure” (20).

Carr then informs us that, around the same time Nietzsche switched to a typewriter, a man named Frederick Winslow Taylor invented a regimented program that separated every element of steel plant machinists’ jobs into “a sequence of small discrete steps” (21). Taylor then tested different methods of completing each step to develop “a set of precise instructions—an ‘algorithm,’ we might say today—for how each worker should work” (21). This caused a sizeable increase in productivity—although many machinists felt that the system transformed them into mere robots. However, Taylor’s system was quickly adopted by manufacturers domestically and internationally: “Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well,” Carr asserts (23).

Carr uses Google’s mandate to “systematize everything,” as well as the company CEOs’ stated desire to perfect its search engine to eventually perfect artificial intelligence as proof of this (24). Carr writes, “[Google’s] easy assumption that we’d all ‘be better off’ if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized” (28). Carr also points out that this regimentation of the human mind “is the [Internet’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” (29). In this atmosphere, it hurts the bottom line of such advertisers to promote the slow, considered reading and thinking pace of previous eras.

Carr then admits that he may be overly anxious in his assertions. He concedes that every introduction of a major new technology was attended to by naysayers. He states that it’s perfectly possible that the utopian prognostications and potential of the Internet could happen. However, he cites Wolf’s argument that “deep reading […] is indistinguishable from deep thinking” to shore up his own credibility (32): “If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture,” Carr posits (33). For Carr, this process is, in the words of the playwright Richard Foreman, “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’” (33). 

Carr then circles back to the 2001: A Space Odyssey scene with which he opened the essay. He notes that the computer HAL’s pleas were the most human aspect of the scene, contrasted against “the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm” (34). He fears that human intelligence will become oversimplified and impoverished into artificial intelligence if our society continues to rely too uncritically “on computers to mediate our understanding of the world” (34).