Nicholas Carr asks if Google is making us stupid:
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
Drinking with friends on Friday, I made light of a similar problem. Whereas I used to be able to recall specific entries in texts I’d devoured, I find myself struggling to recall even basic information. “My brain’s become Google-dependent. It’s like I’ve outsourced my memory.”
Carr speaks more to how we digest information than how we store it, how he worries that he’s become a skimmer, increasingly unable to read deeply. I haven’t found that to be the case. Given the right material, I can still easily get lost in the text. Of course, most of my reading is done on planes and in buses, places where my options for entertainment are limited. Focus comes easier when there’s little else to jump to. I imagine if I had access to my feeds 24/7 in those places, it’d be a different story.