--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: '046'
+title: Ok, I was wrong, it seems that Google is indeed "making you stupid"
+date: April 24, 2016
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: asphalt
+---
+
+Back in Cretaceous while I was still publishing my thoughts on the old
+blog, I participated in a very interesting debate with people of the
+so-called "Romanian blogosphere" of those times[^1]. The discussion was
+on the influence of the Internet on the various real and/or perceived
+properties of [human thought][ganditul].
+
+More precisely, some guy had previously published in The Atlantic an
+essay entitled "[Is Google Making Us Stupid?][atlantic]", to which I
+hastily, in my sheer naïveté, responded that no, it couldn't be such,
+since some of us still enjoy that otherwise unfashionable activity of
+deep reading; and moreover, that this isn't a problem worthy of focusing
+on, since civilization will adapt as it has in the past and so on and so
+forth.
+
+In retrospect, the reader must agree with the premise that the question
+posed by the initial article denotes idiocy on the author's part. I
+don't remember whether this was the case at the time, but "Is X verb Y?"
+is a memetic Newspeak-ism that deliberately obfuscates meaning. What
+does "making" mean? who is "us"? what does "stupid" mean? and so on and
+so forth. What qualia does the article propose to scrutinize? Of course,
+it's easy to quote personal experiences, anecdotes and so-called
+studies, and to reason upon them. What's considerably more difficult is
+being rigorous about the whole bullshit, at the risk of offending
+others. Pertinent sociological studies may or may not have been done in
+the meantime, you are welcome to point them out to me if you see
+fit. Meanwhile, let us take a different approach to deconstructing the
+problem.
+
+Google is a wonderful tool, as are the Web and the Internet[^2]. There
+was essentially nothing before the Internet, and very little before the
+Web[^3]. While Google (the search engine) is a great piece of software,
+it's far from being the first of its kind, which means that the
+necessity of being able to find things in the vast stuff of the Web[^4]
+was there not in 1998, not even in 1995, but from the very beginning of
+things. Thus denying the usefuleness of, and moreover, the need for
+Google as a tool for finding information on the Internet would be like
+denying the need for a hammer to drive nails or the need for a gun to
+shoot down your enemy[^5].
+
+However, Google has, like many things have since that day in 2001 when
+the world ended for a brief moment, gone through many sets of
+transformations. At some point -- I cannot tell exactly when, and again,
+maybe here the perspicacious reader might have the patience to enlighten
+me -- it became a tool that was separated from its purpose, or, to put
+it more bluntly, it became a victim of [marketing][marketing], not
+unlike Facebook[^6] and many others which we won't recollect here due to
+space constraints.
+
+So yes, breaking news! your environment is shaping the way you think in
+both subtle and obvious ways. In his essay, Carr gives us Nietzsche's
+example,
+
+> "You are right," Nietzsche replied, "our writing equipment takes part
+> in the forming of our thoughts." Under the sway of the machine,
+> writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s
+> prose 'changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns,
+> from rhetoric to telegram style.'
+
+but he deliberately ignores the initial conditions that he himself
+has observed:
+
+> Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a
+> Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing,
+> and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and
+> painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to
+> curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it
+> up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had
+> mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed,
+> using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from
+> his mind to the page.
+
+Kittler's observation is an interesting one, to say the least. However,
+stating that the author's writing was shaped by the typewriter is no
+more and no less valid than stating that it was largely influenced by
+his failing eyesight or his age. For all we know, it probably was a mix
+of these conditions -- and indeed, of many others -- that led to his
+telegraphic writing.
+
+So yes, I was wrong, Google "is making you[^7] stupid" if[^8] you've
+accustomed yourself to viewing the world through the narrow screen of an
+Android phone, subjecting yourself to the random information its
+so-called "timeline"[^9] is feeding you, going through regurgitated
+"targeted" and "tailored" "news" or whatever it is that you're
+consuming. It is indeed turning you into a "pancake", or worse yet, into
+an amorphous mass of goo ready to be shaped into a mold, by constantly
+asking for your attention through endless "notifications" that you'll
+never bother to disable, for the sake of "user experience". For all I
+know, Google's already achieved its purpose, so now what?
+
+While I admire Carr's conservativeness and his asking of questions
+almost eight years ago, I can only laugh at his own naïveté:
+
+> Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives --
+> or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts -- as the Internet
+> does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there's
+> been little consideration of how, exactly, it's reprogramming us. The
+> Net's intellectual ethic remains obscure.
+
+On the contrary, I think there's been much consideration. Google's
+machine learning algorithms have reduced your intellect to a statistical
+model. That is all you are now, and even if you think more of yourself,
+that doesn't matter to Google, and no one will ever see why it
+would. "Like", "share", "unique viewers" and "returns" are all that
+matter.
+
+What's more baffling is the fact that, for all the debates it has
+stirred all over the web these past few years, Nicholas Carr's essay
+remains a brief historical "I told you so" note and not much else. This
+is -- quite ironically, come to think of it -- an illustration of the
+fact that "awareness" doesn't work when it involves actual
+thinking. Meanwhile, more irony at eleven o'clock: The Atlantic fucks
+its readers over with shitty ads and civilization continues to fail.
+
+[^1]: This is in a purely coincidental manner related to this post's
+ subject. A generation ago "those times" used to mean "a generation
+ ago", while now "those times" means "five or six years ago". Of
+ course, the idea of whether "a lot of time" actually passed between
+ then and now is still up for debate.
+
+[^2]: I assume that the astute reader is able to distinguish and
+ discriminate between the three. Otherwise, there's the door.
+
+[^3]: People of "the previous generation" might remember Gopher, Usenet
+ and so on. I wasn't there, but it would make a lot of sense to
+ compare these to nowadays' technologies, which would give some
+ historical perspective on the latter's *actual* usefuleness.
+
+[^4]: But not -- and this is a very important point -- on the
+ Internet. Although CERN's version of hypertext appeared while the
+ Internet was still largely an experimental thing, the two developed
+ independently. That is, there is a vast amount of stuff in the even
+ vaster amount of stuff that is the Internet that you won't find
+ using Google. Ever.
+
+[^5]: Feel free to replace "Google" with an equally stupid name that you
+ and your friends use.
+
+[^6]: Facebook has a very similar history to Google's. It wasn't the
+ first social networking site, maybe not even the greatest, but it
+ became "the norm" in this field.
+
+ They're also very similar in that they're both serving the same
+ purpose nowadays, which is serving ads, more so that Google is
+ desperately trying to become the Social Network, while Facebook is
+ desperately trying to become the Search Engine. Funny how these
+ things go, right?
+
+[^7]: Not "us". Never *us*.
+
+[^8]: This is a very big "if". As a matter of fact, Diana was spot-on on
+ [her initial point][diana] that Google merely gives you the
+ opportunity to dumben yourself. Fortunately for us sane people, this
+ doesn't make it any less useful of a search engine.
+
+[^9]: Or "stream". Same shit, really.
+
+[ganditul]: http://lucian.mogosanu.ro/bricks/ganditul-in-era-tehnologica/
+[atlantic]: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
+[marketing]: /posts/y02/043-on-the-failure-of-marketing.html
+[diana]: http://www.dianacoman.com/blog/2010/02/21/google-te-prosteste-nu-iti-ofera-doar-mai-multe-oportunitati-sa-o-faci-singur/
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