The July issue of The Atlantic arrived at my parent’s house today. It contains a Nicholas Carr essay entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. The article is worth a look (in a twist, it isn’t on the Internet yet), but it isn’t anything particularly profound. Basically, his argument is that the Internet, and especially Google, is replacing the way our brains are wired with a more parallel approach to information acquisition, information processing, and information retention. I would imagine that most people who blog, rss, and otherwise live the Web2.0 lifestyle (I think “rss” should be a verb) have, if they stop to think about it, noticed that this change is occurring. While I’ve read three books this week, that’s my job and I’ve noticed that it’s getting harder for me to focus on it now that I’ve got so much information competing for my time.
The thing is, though, I live in an information ecology that doesn’t normally value this style of thought. Instead, the English Department continues to value the long, complex, linear narratives that dominated our cultural mind before television and that Carr says are passing away. Frankly, I don’t think this is really how the story goes: television clearly killed the book and, as Carr also points out, people are reading more, now, than they were 20 years ago. This fact troubles a lot of people (again, Carr says that this reading is a new and different kind of reading that removes a lot of the contemplation of linear text consumption), but I see it as positive. Also, when I make this claim about text and English Studies’ relationship with it, I don’t just mean on a profound level: I’m interested in how many of colleagues’ eyes glaze over when I start excitedly babbling about RSS readers and Twitter. On some fundamental level English Studies has never understood the Internet.
