Nick Carr tells us that Google and the Net are making us stupid. And, over at Slate, Michael Agger calls us “Lazy Bastards” for how we read online.
So, what do you think? Is the Net destroying our attention spans and turning us in to mindless, robotic sheep?
[My own take… The Net isn’t making us stupid, but it is changing the way we process information and, for better or worse, affecting our patience regarding some forms of media / writing. The death of media scarcity and the rise of information abundance was bound to have profound implications for how we read, write and communicate—in most ways for the better, but perhaps in some ways for the worse. I doubt we’ll ever have a Shakespeare arising from the world of Twitter, for example, but I believe we are better off for having technologies and media platforms like it in our lives. We just all struggling to find balance and a sensible middle ground in a world where our senses are being bombarded with an unprecedented number of choices and volume of information. But I’ll take that predicament over our miserable past existence any day of the week. Down with scarcity; up with abundance!]
Are you still reading, or have I already lost your attention?!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.