Defense of the Internet, or, Google is not making us stupid

I’ve been linked to this article in The Atlantic by Nick Carr before…but I never really dug deeply into it until recently…Is Google Making Us Dumb?

It sounded to me like some relic of the past era, really…a way for old people to cling back to their superior generations long past (didn’t you know…when they were kids, kids actually respected their elders…and there weren’t diseases and mental illnesses such as we have now. People just sucked it up as they walked 20 miles in the snow up hill both ways to school.)

But it strikes a chord in me. I’ve gotten into discussions with many people who assume that…if you don’t read for fun you must surely be some kind of neanderthal. You’re anti-intellectual. Now, we have a scapegoat — it is Google and the rest of the internet’s fault that we want things NOW and aren’t patient enough to dig for it (but digg is still ok).

The sentiment isn’t completely unfounded. I know too many people on MySpace or Facebook who write in their Favorite Books section: “Books? Who reads those?!” In varying levels of spelling or grammar creativity or color of language, no less. Looking at their works doesn’t inspire confidence. These are people who feed the coffers of pop culture…that impressive, yet “inferior” bastard cousin of “high culture.” MTV over museums, things like that. You don’t have much hope for the future when you hear them talk about what they are doing, what they have done, or what they want to do with their lives.

So I understand partially why it is shocking when I mention I have few favored novels (ironically, though, I am fond of the behemoth works in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series…but they are oh…so…long). Do I not have aspirations? Do I not think deeply? Personally, I just don’t get into it very easily. People immediately sour their opinion if I point out the fact that books are just words on paper, and with fiction…those words mean incredibly little. AT LEAST with nonfiction, I learn something useful every time…so that keeps me going for more. With the internet though, it’s even better, because I am not required to invest massive amounts of time to get information.

But silly me, the internet doesn’t count as reading! It is a perversion of what is supposed to be a higher, better way of novels and treatises.

I used to defend my position with something by Annie Dillard we had to analyze in AP English years ago:

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses–the imagination’s vision, and the imagination’s hearing–and the moral sense, and the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks you and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. The reader’s ear must adjust down from the loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can’t yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing’s modulations, its up and downs and louds and softs.

It seemed so simply true…being able to get absorbed into a novel is just a private sense for a select few. In any case, you have to warm up to novels, so even if you have this sense, there are other media which are much more immediate. Video games, movies, and now…the internet.

The only thing I couldn’t reconcile was…how could I say that not having a patience for reading was as good as or better than having a sense for it? This discovery only allowed for pity — just as some people pity people who would much rather listen to pop music over classical (just because) — and not equality.

So, eventually, I came back to Carr’s article…and this time, it had a hyperlink to Scott Karp’s blog…so I decided to click into it (and Karp had some insightful things to say about the difference between quoting and linking: [and maybe my senses are dull, but I sense some animosity -- Karp actually has a lot to say regarding Carr's article]).

The plot thickens when Karp’s actual words are put into context: instead of lamenting his loss of voracity in reading (as Carr infers), he asks if instead, this isn’t an evolution that the internet allows us.

It makes a lot of sense to me exactly as he describes: we are making a transition from the old, dominant mode of thinking linearly…to a new mode of thinking based on networking…loose association…jumping from point to point.

When writing articles (however rarely I do so), I wonder if I can herd everything into a sensible article. I have a bunch of jumbled roads of information I want to travel down and I have a lot I want to link. It all makes sense to me…but only in context to the stream of thought which unfortunately cannot be easily conveyed.

So, then, what if the answer is as Karp says later on in his Connecting the Dots of the Web Revolution?

Maybe I don’t need 250 page books anymore because the web enables me to connect ideas and create narratives that I used to depend on book authors to do for me, because I wasn’t able to access all the information and connect all the dots myself.