Disintermediated!

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr, writing in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, thinks so. Or, to be precise, he thinks that spending too much time on the Internet is making him less able to focus on long texts.

"Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory," Carr reports.

"What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he goes on to say. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles."

How do we read online? According to a British study that Carr quotes,

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

When we read online, Carr quotes Tufts developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf as saying, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, which Carr defines as making "the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction," only gets in the way when it comes to power-browsing.

Power-browsing is, of course, precisely how software -- Google's, or Amazon's, etc. -- reads texts. The Internet is "a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information," Carr writes, "and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “'one best method' -- the perfect algorithm -- to carry out every mental movement of what we've come to describe as 'knowledge work.'" Like those paranoid types who used to argue that typewriters exercise a sinister influence over our brains, Carr argues that our use of Google's software, for example, is "shaping the neural circuits inside our brains," making us power-browsers instead of readers.

Carr may well be right -- but let's give credit to Chris Fujiwara for predicting this line of inquiry 10 years ago, in the 14th issue of Hermenaut. In an essay titled "Disintermediated!" Fujiwara drew a parallel between the New Economy-friendly elimination of the middleman and certain intellectual function -- in particular, reading and interpreting texts.

Thanks in large part to the Internet, Fujiwara noted, bank tellers, insurance brokers, and travel agents, among others, were increasingly no longer needed to mediate between businesses and their customers. In the name of efficiency, they were disintermediated. Likewise, in the name of efficiency, readers were being disintermediated. Writers, he claimed, were being trained to produce texts not for inefficient human readers, but for efficient software to parse.

"How long before the permanent unemployment now creeping up on us will have also overtaken our ability to produce and interpret texts?" Fujiwara demanded.

We've secured longevity for our words -- magnetic and optical storage being indefinitely renewable and much higher-density and considerably cheaper than wax, papyrus, or paper. But our words' ultimate destination is no longer a human reader or a human court of judgment.... Instead, judgment will be passed on them by search-and-retrieval technologies that pulverize texts into concatenations of "keywords," by electronic "gatekeepers," accounting systems, and virtual bugging devices that log "hits" and track the "behavior" of the accessing agent.

As readers, Fujiwara lamented, we were increasingly oriented toward recognizing what we wanted to find in texts, instead of wandering in the vineyards of the text, allowing ourselves to be surprised and delighted.

If Nicholas Carr is to be believed, the charmless future that Fujiwara predicted in 1998 is now upon us.