Anyone who has spent a few hours on the Internet understands how reading a single paragraph can lead to a multimedia journey so far-reaching you forget what you originally went online to look up. Nicholas Carr — author of last July's Atlantic cover story, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" — believes the distracted nature of Web surfing is reducing our capacity for deep contemplation and reflection. He began developing his theory when he realized that, after years of online information gathering, he had trouble reading a book or a magazine. As he puts it, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. . . . I'm not thinking the way I used to think."
Growing up in a small town in central Connecticut in the seventies, Carr couldn't have imagined he'd someday make a career of critiquing computer technology. He read a great deal as a boy and entered Dartmouth College with hopes of becoming a writer. He graduated in 1981 with a degree in English literature and spent a year working as an editor and playing in a punk-rock band before he entered a graduate program in English literature at Harvard University. The theoretical focus of his courses failed to captivate him, however, and Carr soon realized that he didn't want to become a professor. He got his master's degree and left.
Carr and his new wife had a baby on the way, so he took an editorial position at a management-consulting firm. He ended up staying twelve years and getting an education in business, economics, and the blossoming field of information technology, or it. In 1997 he became senior editor of the Harvard Business Review. It was the height of the dot-com boom, and Carr spent nearly six years editing articles about business strategy and it. Then in 2003 he wrote an article for the Review titled "IT Doesn't Matter," arguing that as computers have become almost universal, they no longer provide a competitive advantage to companies. The piece aroused much interest — and contempt; Microsoft ceo Steve Ballmer called it "hogwash." Harvard Business School Press offered Carr a book contract, and Does IT Matter? was published in 2004. That success led to a second book, The Big Switch (W.W. Norton & Co.), about "cloud computing" — providing computing software over the Internet, like electric power sent out over a grid. While writing The Big Switch, Carr became interested in the social and cultural implications of the Internet, which led to his Atlantic cover story and the book he's currently working on, tentatively titled The Shallows: Mind, Memory, and Media in an Age of Instant Information.
As for all those years studying literature, forty-nine-year-old Carr has no regrets. In fact, he believes learning to deconstruct poems and stories trained him to think analytically and led him to where he is today. Carr's methodical mind — the "Google effect" notwithstanding — has given him an impressive ability to dissect the ever-expanding cyberworld. He blogs at www.roughtype.com and recently moved from New England to the Colorado Rockies to spend more time outdoors, hiking, fly-fishing, and skiing — and deepening his ability to be contemplative.
Cooper: You've quoted Richard Foreman, author of the play The Gods Are Pounding My Head, who says we are turning into "pancake people."
Carr: We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal — none of us actually fulfilled it — but there was this sense that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. Foreman suggests that we might be replacing that model — for both intelligence and culture — with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We'll become "pancake people," with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there's little need to contain information within our heads when it's so easy to find with a mouse click or two.
Cooper: In your Atlantic article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" you suggest that using the Internet has actually lessened your ability to concentrate while reading. What led you to this conclusion?
Carr: I was having trouble sitting down and immersing myself in a book, something that used to be totally natural to me. When I read, my mind wanted to behave the way it behaves when I'm online: jumping from one piece of information to another, clicking on links, checking e-mail, and generally being distracted. I had a growing feeling that the Internet was programming me to do these things and pushing on me a certain mode of thinking: on the one hand, distracted; on the other hand, efficient and able to move quickly from one piece of information to another. In the article, I focused on Google because it's the dominant presence on the Net — at least, when it comes to gathering information. It provides a window into how the Internet is imposing its own intellectual ethic on its users at both a technological and an economic level.
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