While searching for any excuse to not be blogging (and delaying any lectorial posts) I skimmed through my Following list and saw Ryan’s post about technological determinism posted on his much acclaimed Knock Knock Appreciation Blog and thought it was time to give in. Short and sweet (the opposite to my posts), he touches on Nicolas Carr’s 2008 essay ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?‘, something I took the liberty of reading (at least 80% of). Today, writings on social media’s influence on our brains has been done almost to death, but flashing back to 2008 Carr’s writings seem all the more stimulating. 2008 was hardly long ago yet I can recall next to nothing from the year (I was eleven, grade 5: I think I was excelling at at maths? Still blind and glasses-less, struggling my way through life), and the notion of social media and the internet seems so recent that 2008 somehow feels like decades in the past, and Carr something of a prophet (hyperbole), even though Facebook had been around for almost half a decade the internet itself almost two. This mindset just comes from being born in the 90s, I guess.

Even trying to write this, I became distracted an uncountable amount of times, engrossed in my phone or struggling to stand by the deal I made (and often make) with myself where I reward my unwavering attention to a task with a YouTube video or something of the like (the video usually comes first, and most of the time stimulates positive work). Even just reading this, I had the tendency to skim sections relating to the history of the theory and take a liking to cute little metaphors that basically summed up arguments like “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski“, and “The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.”” You win this time, Carr.

Regardless, Carr’s writings ring as true now as they did then. But since, the phenomenon The Google Effect has been named, and the answer to Carr’s question answered: yeah righto, maybe a little bit, in one way or another. The effect, also known as digital amnesia is defined as the “tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines” and is definitely something I have fallen victim to (not that it doesn’t have its benefits; thanks, amalgamation of information readily available at our fingertips).

Even in Popular Culture in Everyday Life, one of my chosen electives for first semester, we were taught how to properly skim pieces of writing. There’s no doubt it’s an efficient tool when left in the right hands. But there’s also no doubt that some aspects of the ever-engrossing truthfulness of technological determinism are problematic. I read less books than I used to (something I’ve been trying to change as of late; even though I never really read that many books) and although the enjoyment I draw from skimming articles online is a far cry from that of traditional (often physical; maybe an influence?) books, I do get fidgety and think to reach for my phone. It’s not the healthiest thing, and when I am putting myself in a position where I want or need to read for an extended period, I put my phone at least out of arm’s reach. Moreover, the AMC ‘phones in the cinema’ debacle in April, with CEO’s possibility of a ‘texting section’ or ‘specific auditorium and make them more texting friendly’ (many explicitly explicitly asked that these be clearly labelled so they know which ones to stay as far as possible away from) stemming from a similar strand of thinking.

In the increasingly digitised world of 2016, Carr’s claim that “In Google’s world … The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive” is at least a little prophetic. The problem now is that the hard drive is failing, and at a more rapid rate than expected.