Responding to Responses to 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?'

Of the many blog posts and articles I read over the weekend that examined, analyzed, and otherwise responded to the Carr-Shirkey "debate" on the effects digital media has and will have on nature of thought (though Carr's article was meant as a standalone piece, it's hard for me to disassociate Shirkey's response to it) , the most convincing comments on the issue came from W. Daniel Hillis on The Edge.

In the post, Hillis tackles some of the same points that Shirkey made in his original response, but he elucidates some of Shirkey's more contentious statements and does so in a way that makes it difficult to disagree with him. In his response to Carr, Shirkey uses the the example of the novel War and Peace to question the value of the kind of thinking Carr is worried will soon be lost. He uses an assumed low perception of the novel among modern-day readers — "It's too long, and not so interesting" — to challenge the idea that lengthy written works (which makes sustained critical reading necessary) are intrinsically more valuable to society, which Carr seems to promote.

Hillis aptly reworks this argument by saying that it is not the value of the novel's content which should be questioned, but the medium through which the novel is delivered. A self-proclaimed bibliophile and fan of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Hillis wonders if the novel's themes of "power, fate, and personal responsibility" are more valid than "a season of The Wire", a television drama that is likely much more familiar to most people than War and Peace. War and Peace may be well-known as a very long Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy, but what more does the average person know about it? That's assuming that a majority of literate people know of the book's existence, which may be a bit generous on my part.

An important question to ask is whether long, sustained concentration is superior to short-term, dynamic thinking. Do we get a better return on long pieces of work for our investment? Shirkey says no, that reading War and Peace is ultimately a waste of time. Hillis, though, only says maybe. While not outright decrying the novel as Shirkey does, he admits that "as much as I liked War and Peace, I probably got more out of The Wire." Though it may seem odd to focus so much on a novel when Carr's article claims to be about more than reading, about the ability for modern humans to think critically, his article only approaches it from a literary standpoint. Shirkey seems to rightly point out that Carr appears more worried about the death of the hyper-literate intellectual than anything else.

Carr says that he sees an intellectual change among many of his friends and colleagues, but he also says that they are mostly "literary types". But just because they are suffering under new changes doesn't mean everyone is; new platforms for knowledge like Wikipedia (which embodies the hyper-linking style that promotes what Carr might call "shallow reading") have been a boon to scientists, programmers, and various other technical thinkers. And as a commenter (whose name I can't seem to find) said, new tools like Google are the product of considerable amounts of concentration and critical thinking. The book and lengthy response may lose their place in modern society, but that doesn't mean they won't continue to exist in other forms.

I think Carr's piece suffers because of the assumption it makes in the title: divergent thinking is not the same thing as being 'stoopid'. It's (relatively) new, yes, but change always accompanies the adoption of new technology.

Finally, it's hard for me to get away from one question that has nagged me since my first reading of Is Google Making Us Stoopid?; what if Carr and co. are having difficulty staying focused because they're getting older?