Rita Davis

There was a day, June I think, when

I pre-remembered everything we did

you threw sand at

the sky and it shattered the blue

again and again I watched it

all as though reliving it some years later,

clinging to the

present while I stepped into the

future – soon I forgot where the

present left off and the past began and

time moved strangely

through me and you held my hand and

when you left to find out what was

hiding in the rest of the universe

there was still sand

high in the air and you laughed

read the full interview here, but i’ve excerpted some of the best bits, like this:

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.

and this:

Cooper: In the September 2008 issue of Wired David Wolman answers your question “Is Google making us stupid?” with “No, but it makes a handy scapegoat for an inability to cope with information overload.” He goes on to say, “The explosion of knowledge represented by the Internet and abetted by all sorts of digital technologies makes us more productive and gives us the opportunity to become smarter, not dumber.” What’s your response?

Carr: There have been two general criticisms of my article. One is that the phenomenon that I write about — the loss of the ability to concentrate and be contemplative — simply isn’t happening. The other is that it’s happening, but what we gain is much greater than what we lose. I think the Wired piece is more in the latter camp: this wealth of information is so beneficial, the argument goes, that it doesn’t matter if our brains change.

I guess it comes down to what you value about human intelligence and, by extension, human culture. Do you believe that intelligence is a matter of tapping into huge amounts of information as fast as possible — being “more productive,” as the Wired writer says — or do you think intelligence means stepping back from that information, thinking about it, and drawing your own conclusions in a calm, thoughtful way? My own feeling is that I’d rather have less information and more thoughtfulness. I certainly want information, but information isn’t an end unto itself. Human intelligence is the ability to make sense of that information.

and this:

Cooper: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger says you’re blaming the Internet and programmers for your own unwillingness to think long and hard. What’s your response to that?

Carr: That’s a variation on the old “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” theme. It implies that technologies influence us only when we allow them to influence us, and that we control the nature of that influence. It’s a comforting idea, because it puts us in the driver’s seat, but it’s nonsense, as a quick glance at history will tell you. The human mind has been shaped in profound ways by the invention of the alphabet, the map, the book, and many other media technologies — and we did not get to control the shaping process. We control some aspects of our technologies, but our technologies control some aspects of us. There’s a memorable sentence in Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”

Cooper: In the “iGod” chapter of your book The Big Switch you describe Google’s desire to “have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind.” Google cofounder Sergey Brin even hypothesizes about “a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.”

Carr: The Googlers are nothing if not ambitious. All information technologies, I believe, have an intellectual ethic — in other words, a set of assumptions about how we should use our brains. And Google’s ethic reflects its origins in computer science. It wants to make us fast, efficient collectors of information, in many ways mimicking computers. If you look at the pronouncements of Google’s founders or its ceo, you see that their goal is for the Google search engine to become a form of artificial intelligence. They want it to be something that extends the capacity of your mind, or even provides you with a better mind than your old-fashioned flesh-and-blood one. They seem to believe that ultimately the Internet will provide the basis for the next generation of human intelligence — you could say posthuman intelligence.

Cooper: What’s wrong with that?

Carr: Well, for one thing, computers have yet to replicate any aspect of human intelligence in a meaningful way. So the glorification of artificial intelligence, or machine intelligence, reflects a narrow view of human intellect and human potential — one that is essentially mathematical and industrial and doesn’t give much credit to the great triumphs of culture: works of art, literature, music, architecture. My fear is that a definition of intelligence that discredits the individual mind in favor of some automated collective mind will feed powerful systems: governments, corporations, and other large institutions. And it will emphasize efficiency of thought over depth of thought. I fear we’re going to lose, as I’ve said, the kind of contemplative, reflective intelligence that is most valuable, most human.