Is Google making us ask unanswerable questions?

British neu­ro­sci­en­tist Baroness Greenfield points out that pre­scrip­tions for drugs like Ritalin and diag­noses of ADHD are on the rise. She cor­re­lates that with an increase in com­puter use over the past decade, asks a few open ended ques­tions and implies that com­puter use is rot­ting children’s brains.

I don’t doubt that com­put­ers will change how we think. I don’t doubt that they already have changed how we think. I, too, read Nicholas Carr’s essay in the Atlantic and silently nod­ded in agree­ment for most of it. Yes, I find it harder now than I once did to sit down a read for extended peri­ods of time or to read with­out skim­ming para­graphs that seem unim­por­tant — but I owe that to years spent in grad school and not to years spent on the Internet.

Writing changed human mem­ory; most would argue along with Plato that it has made our mem­o­ries worse because we don’t have to remem­ber as much as our oral-tradition ances­tors. Remember Hamlet? That guy quoted whole pas­sages from plays he’d seen the play­ers enact when he was a kid. I can’t do that — not with plays, any­how, except for Hamlet. (I am well versed in my favorite lines from movies and more than enough song lyrics to drive my friends batty).

The point is this: New meth­ods of com­mu­ni­cat­ing change the way peo­ple think. We can­not fairly judge whether it is bet­ter or worse than past meth­ods because we are a part of the change, we are in the midst of it. Carr can’t tell me objec­tively whether com­put­ers are rot­ting his brain because he is plugged into the sys­tem, which he admits in his article.

Unfortunately, there won’t be answers for a long time, not until we’ve had time to estab­lish tra­di­tions that fit with our new mode of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We can look back on the ori­gins of writ­ing and the print­ing press now with some sem­blance of objec­tiv­ity. I’ll admit to a faster paced future and say that we should wait at least another 50 years for answers as to how com­put­ers and the Internet have changed the way we think.

Until then, we are left with noth­ing but ques­tions with­out answers, both from Carr (“Is Google Making us Stupid?”) and from Greenfield (who leaves about a half dozen of them open in the BBC article).

Related posts:

1. Google as the news industry’s mid­dle man
2. Making your com­puter play the Flip video files (Mac version)
3. Google Reverts to Post-Katrina Imagery
4. Google Reader or not, that is the question
5. Google Lawsuits