Google makes us cleverer
I admire Andrew Sullivan. More than that, it was through his Daily Dish that I was introduced to the world of blogs. But I disagree with his article in The Sunday Times yesterday, in which he suggests that the internet may be depriving us of "quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives". He worries that the instant access to information and the pond-skater nature of screen-reading, from link to link, will mean fewer and fewer people reading anything as long as a book in the sustained and reflective way he remembers from his youth.
The still, small voice of calm that refreshes a civilisation may be in the process of being snuffed out by myriad distractions.
This comes dangerously close to the Tara Brabazon thesis, that the internet is dumbing down a generation of students reared on Google and Wikipedia, which she calls "white bread for the mind". It's nonsense. Just as previous technologies - notably printing and television - made humanity more intelligent by broadening the knowledge available to more and more people, so the internet is another vast bolt-on to the collective human brain. It is an add-on, not a distraction.
For instance, all the evidence is that the internet encourages people to read more books, not fewer. We know more, can access much more, much more quickly, and so are, individually and collectively, cleverer than ever. (Cleverer, that is, not better.)
I hope Sullivan is simply confusing his personal experience of working too hard (300 posts a day?) with the end of civilisation as we know it.
Doesn't make the slightest difference, people will use it just the same as they would a reference book. It still remains to sort out the wheat from the chaff, the fact from fiction. Sensible people will use it intelligently to gain knowledge and information and the stupid one will use it to support their bias/bigotry.
Posted by: flipped | Monday, 16 June 2008 at 01:13 PM