DISTRACTION

Excellent article on the Internet up on The Atlantic (thanks, Lally!) that ties the internet into the long history of automated “choreography” characteristic of the industrialized world.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their 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. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’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. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

The article argues that even if we take in more textual information in the information age, our response to these texts is more reflexive and superficial. When we read online,

we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

I’m not entirely sure why this is something we ought to worry about, but more importantly I’m not convinced that the premise is right. Personally, I find myself reading longer articles more thoroughly since I started blogging, because I am looking for specific quotes or themes that I want to echo here. While it is true that I read very little off-line, it is also true that very little of what I want to read is only found off-line.

The trick, of course, is that what I read online is fairly tightly constrained by what I am looking for. Since my interests are pretty narrow and well defined– in other words, since my ‘rich mental connections’ are already formed– these interests ultimately guide my web crawling to places that encourage deeper thought and analysis.

Such an approach ought to satisfy critics of the internet, who worry that the unguided dancing across hyperlinks leaves us without any unified narrative to tie together these disparate and otherwise unconnected patches of information. Since I bring my interests to the net instead of waiting for the net to give them to me, I remain coherent throughout the crawling experience, and can therefore exercise my intellectual needs in a satisfying manner.

However, against the critics I would argue that unguided free play on the net can be incredibly instructive for shaping the interests and themes that ultimately begin to guide a mature use of the net. It is in this sense that Google isn’t merely a replacement for the automated routines of brains, but instead is something like an tutor that helps us sort out the tangle of information to make real the possibilities and pursuits that would otherwise get lost in the shuffle.