MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Nicholas Carr wrote a very long, very interesting article in which he posed the question: Is Google making us stupid? In it he alleges that the way in which Google structures its information encourages us to skim over data rather than absorbing it. He says that after years of chasing down information on the Net in this way, his attention span is such that he can no longer read long bits of text, that his mind starts to wander after 2 or 3 pages, and that deep reading has become a chore, not a pleasure.

According to Carr, he is not alone in this supposition, he’s supported by Clive Thompson of Wired, who has said that the advantages and conveniences of internet searching come at a price, and that the channels through which we obtain our information (namely the internet and by association, Google) shape the way we think. This is a theory that is borne out by Scott Karp, an online media blogger, who has admitted that he no longer reads books at all. Considering that he majored in Literature in college that confession must have cost him dearly. Karp believes he has given up his beloved books, not because he reads differently, but because he thinks differently, and that the change was wrought by the convenience that Google supplies.

There is a perception in today’s world that all technological advancements are good. We don’t question what they are good for, or what the long-term implications of their “goodness” are, we simply accept that as technology moves forward, so do we. We seldom consider that as our technical know-how increases, our sphere of human interaction, our human know-how if you will, seems to decrease. As we become more wrapped up in a convenient virtual world where we can make friends, do business and learn, we tend to neglect our physical world and lose sight of what it means to be human.

Alarmists (and I do try so hard not to be one) claim that we are moving ever closer to George Orwell’s Big Brother future. We’re under increasing technological surveillance from government institutions and while the Internet has served to make the world smaller (think global village) our lives seem to have shrunk in proportion, as we become increasingly reliant on computers for even the simplest services.

The men behind Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are undeniably talented and it would be doing them a grave disservice to credit them with anything other than the best of intentions when it comes to acting in the interests of humanity. But we all know what happens to the best intentions, and which road they are said to pave. They make no secret of the fact that their goal is artificial intelligence. Page has said that the ultimate search engine is one that is as smart as or smarter than people. Brin has even gone so far as to say that we’d be better off if we had artificial brains that were smarter than our own.

As technological advancements go, A.I is the Holy Grail, but as far as human evolution goes, A.I would place our species firmly up the proverbial creek. Presumably, by having an artificial brain to do all of that pesky thinking for us, we would be free to … do what? Catch up on our reading? Which would be great, if we hadn’t lost the knack. Spend more time with our friends and families, those that we haven’t alienated by spending every available second online? Or, we could turn our diminishing attention to philosophy, only that involves thinking, and we have our computers to do that.

Nothing in our past suggests that we would compensate for the convenience of having computers do our thinking for us, by moving forward in other ways. We would simply revel in the new found luxury of being spared the task of arduous thought.

Would conscience go next? Alarmingly, that is precisely what Microsoft is proposing to do with their patent application for new digital manners policy technology. With it they propose to switch off your cell phone when you enter a movie theatre, disable your flash when you visit art galleries or museums, and take over other quaintly polite customs we rarely deign to consider. In short, they propose to act in good conscience for us when we fail to do so ourselves. It’s a measure of just how badly society has disintegrated when we trust to technology to act judiciously on our behalf. Our degree of civilisation can best be judged by how we choose to act, not by how our actions are forced upon us.

In his article, Carr cited the playwright Richard Foreman, who said that as we are drained of our inner repository of cultural inheritance, risk turning into “’pancake people’ – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” The idea of a world full of ‘pancake people’ should be enough to scare anyone. I know it scares the bejeesus out of me.