Bill Thompson writes very well. Let's get that straight. (Though the irony of reading a post which was as long as a newspaper feature, about the loss of attention we're all suffering as a result of too many online stimuli wasn't lost on me - especially when it was a online story about an essay which was much longer to start with). Any writer who can mention Twitter, LSD and Piaget on one article deserves praise. His BBC column about Nick Carr's is - as my colleagues would say - cute.
Nicholas Carr has started a decent discussion going, in The Atlantic, and then in the Sunday Times. His premise is pretty simple: The more we get used to "chunks" of copy, rather than "tracts" of copy online, the less we're able to cope when the tracts come along.
My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Or, as Bill Thompson sums it up - why should I bother reading War and Peace when someone can tweet me the story in 140 characters?
But, when Carr asks "Is Google making us stupid?" I wonder if he's actually asking the right question? It's not Google, per se. And I don't know that it's hyperlinked information that's actually making us stupid - it's just that people are - once again - adapting to their surroundings. The impact of a new technology means we can adjust the way we live.
- When clocks were invented, and then watches - I bet people changed their behaviour.
- Carr quotes Nietsche, who apparently changed his whole writing style when he started using his first typewriter. (Same thing happened when we all discovered letters, then email, then texting, surely?)
- When calculators came along (and calculators on digital watches too, how cool?) - people stopped knowing how to do long division. Which seems sensible enough to me.
- When I grew up, the BBC News was 30 minutes long. Now you can get it in 30 seconds
- And when I grew up I knew all of my friends' 'phone numbers, and all of their birthdays. Now I'm lucky if I remember my wife's.
But this doesn't make me any more stupid. I like to think (though I have no evidence whatsoever), that I'm using that brainspace much more wisely now - and using the technology that's available more wisely too.
The thing about the internet, and Google in particular is that you can "taste" copy much more easily. And the beauty of it is that you can file your source material however you want - either rely on Google, use social bookmarks, use desktop bookmarks or whatever. We simply don't need to store so much in our heads, but we do need to be better at finding things we've filed outside of our heads. Simple.
But what it does mean is that communicators are going to have to get better at getting their point across quickly. We're all going to be writing for Metro-readers, not The Atlantic readers before too long. If people are bored, they go elsewhere. It's time to practice tweeting.
And the real pressure now becomes one of filtering. There is simply too much information out there. And we simply don't have enough time to process all we want (he says blogging, tweeting and watching France Italy at the same time).
For me, it's the lack of time issue which means we skip from online article to article. There's just so much information online, that the next article is bound to be better than the one you're currently reading. But it's not Google's fault. And it doesn't apply to this article. Or does it?
Summary for twitter: Is Google making us stupid? Kudos to @billt's piece on Nick Carr's Atlantic article. But no, it's any tech which helps us file info better
