Google-Related Stupidity

Since it appeared last summer, Nicholas Carr's Atlantic article has lingered in my mind in a way that no other magazine article I remember reading ever has (which is ironic, given the basic premise of the piece). The conclusion --that Google, the web, and the like won't make us stupider, but it will change how our brains process info-- was left open-ended, in that Carr doesn't take many steps toward formulating a concise theory of precisely how it would change our minds. (At least, not as far as I remember.) That inconclusiveness is probably part of the reason I kept thinking about the piece for months. Whatever the case, Peter Suderman has written what seems to me an insightful take on the post-Google human:

At the end of my favorite novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury posits a rebel faction in which a group of people have formed a society around preserving old books, all of which have been banned. Their method? To memorize the books, to store them in their brains in their entirety — to, for all practical purposes, become the books. This is a tremendously appealing thought to those of us who find meaning and purpose in books, to those who seek refuge in stories (which, let’s face it, is what all of us story addicts are really doing with our lives). The idea is that you can give yourself over to a story not temporarily, but forever. These days, that’s an idea that’s fading fast, as it’s no longer terribly efficient to use our brains to store information. Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored — resulting in what David Brooks called “the outsourced brain.” We won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored.