has google made nick carr stupid?

nick carr is at it again, only this time it’s not search engines making us stupid (those old card catalogs were just the beginning!) now it’s hyperlinks!

since i’m not shying away from ad hominem, let me say that i think carr would have made an excellent curmudgeony middle school principal.

any time a new trend like cell phones or the dewey decimal system comes out (“great, now it will be so easy to find a book in the library, people will forget how!”) he has to say why it will destroy education. and that’s why the swat team shows up when little johnny brings an aspirin to school- we can’t have anything interfering with education!

i’m not in a panic about us losing “in depth” like carr thinks we will, on things where we gain “in context”- people dive incredibly deeply into things like computer languages and even english, these are the same people who click everywhere (except ads.)

and this study… i mean, skinner boxes were great, taught us all something, but when you let the mice out, they don’t behave the same way as they do in skinner boxes- i’m deeply skeptical of this study, itself shallow and people are proving it sort of by jumping to conclusions based on one finding- the initial conclusion.

the most laughable thing is that people are blaming the internet (“it turned me into a newt!”) when channel surfing over the years is surely worse. sit and drool in front of multimedia pablum, just don’t click on links! they distract the proles from their real job…

and since the dawn of man, children have learned by exploring and experiments (which are full of “distractions”)- the job of civilized society is to beat that out of you so you can stare mindlessly into a single page of data and absorb it machine like, to call upon it again- machine-like. anything that stops the presses is bad news.

normally i wouldn’t recommend reading ted nelson but i recommend him miles over nick carr! he’s not worried about links… context is depth!

and i don’t know if people realize this, but footnotes aren’t the only way people stuff “links” into old-fashioned papers… you have to use “many sources” (as long as you don’t let them distract you?) but many papers put notation inline- hypertext wasn’t the origin, and the fact that you can use it to turn pages faster- i mean, people don’t rail like this against speed-readers.

i think if you want to read something more slowly, you’ll probably be capable for the rest of your life. unless it’s reading you want to run away from, and there’s a lot of that (if i read about nick carr, i do it as quickly as possible.)

the purpose of research is to bring many views together- in reading the result you go “in depth” while with links you go in breadth, performing the very same process the researcher did- how can that be a bad thing?

i understand the concern though- just like people used to say to avoid snacks, now people recommend regular healthy snacking to maintain good blood sugar levels- i’m sure “information snacking” is entering its charmingly naive “4 food groups” era. so thank you, nick carr, middle school principal of the internet! i hope you brought enough gum for the whole class.

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