From the LA Times:
the Atlantic featured another essay, by Nicholas Carr, called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The answer was an emphatic, if not altogether wistful, “Yes.”
I didn’t read the article, but I googled it. Here’s the link (now I really feel stupider). Further:
In theory, a tool like Google should free us to be more creative. In reality, there are pitfalls…. the open-endedness of an Internet where “you can imagine knowledge and then find it.” But there is a downside, which, according to Frel, is rather dire: “Pretty good has become the new perfection.”
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn memorized passages of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” he had no choice but to enact the modernist version of oral traditions. This was not an expression of collective culture so much as an extreme example of what T.S. Eliot called “the individual talent.”
Today’s blogs are a mutation of Solzhenitsyn’s modernist mythmaking — where the merely personal becomes a matter of permanent record. Increasingly, mainstream writers cite blogs. Political journalists use them as sources. According to CommonSenseMedia.org, 74% of journalists recently surveyed regularly read blogs, and 84% “say they would or already have used blogs as a primary or secondary source for articles.”
(No, I didn’t read the rest of the LA Times article. Blame it on adult ADHD or the fact that I have six windows open in my browser and I’m getting really hungry and the caffeine from this morning’s latte finally wore off…)
Coffeehouse Junkie 