John Hagel writes about Nick Carr’s talent for “stirring debate”:
the Internet is subtly molding our minds to favor brief snippets of information rather than the nuance and complexity that can only be communicated in much longer forms such as books.
Hagel’s point is:
“…snippets of information alone are deeply dangerous. They distract us with never-ending waves of surface events, spreading us ever thinner and obscuring the deeper structures and dynamics that ultimately are shaping these surface events. Those of us who stay only on the surface, swimming in a sea of snippets, will ultimately lose sight of land.
We need books, or whatever the digital long forms of content are that will replace the book, to help us penetrate the surface and explore the deeper structures and dynamics that make sense of the changes around us.”
I wanted tell Carr that it was TV that made us stupid before Google, but that we keep discovering new ways to demonstrate it. Every generation proves its stupidity in new and wondrous ways.
Now if we could just get the Republican presidential candidate to start reading a book or two, we might be onto something.
YES