Is you stoopid now?
In The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google making us stupid?”
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?†So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,†HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.â€
“I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Carr recounts how, when Nietzsche started using a typewriter, his prose became tighter and more “telegraphic”. Nietzsche said, “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
I know this to be true. The stuff I write with pen and paper sounds different from the stuff I type directly onto a computer. You literally feel more—the texture of the paper, the way the ink flows onto the paper, the bump on your middle finger where you rest your pen—and it soaks into what you’re writing. This isn’t romantic hooey, I’ve been on a 1,000 words a day regimen for over a decade and have empirical data. Also, I don’t really think when I’m typing, it’s like being on automatic pilot. What works for me is composing a story in my notebook, longhand, and then typing it onto my computer, editing (usually tightening the sentences and removing some of the digressions) in the process.
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Page written by Honore de Balzac, who kept a lot of cats, drank a lot of coffee, and cranked out about a novel a week.
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October 29th, 2008 at 06:46
Yikes. I knew it. I knew typing my entries on an iPhone was making them sound clipped and unexciting.
From now on, I think I will carry my moleskine with me all the time and luxuriate in unabashed verbiage.
By the way, who would have thought that something innocently named “Google” would happen to be the new agent that rewires our brains? You think if they had named it something like Mega-Info Hypermegamechabrain 2000 , we will be more discriminating about the things we do online?
October 29th, 2008 at 08:16
Interesting article by Nicholas Carr… a little long… but some great anecdotes.
October 29th, 2008 at 22:03
On the contrary, I find it easier to write with a keyboard than a pen. I tend to rewrite my sentences several times before I become satisfied with the way an idea is conveyed. If I do this longhand, I would kill way more trees than needed.
October 30th, 2008 at 01:19
Uhh, I was talking about me.
January 4th, 2009 at 23:23
I prefer composing poetry on paper. That’s where the skeleton of my prose comes from, too.