Don’t get me wrong, I think Nicholas Carr is doing us a great service by raising the alarm of how the Internet is ruining our minds. I don’t agree with him 100%, though, and the quote below from a recent interview explains why. The lament is that we cannot contain civilization in our heads anymore. This is a complaint of a book culture that privileges information over relationships. In a book world, ideas are self-contained objects, and we are isolated individuals, which correlates directly with our disconnection with nature.
Instead, we are networks and processes coming into being. Even one of the latest management books from Harvard Business School acknowledges that our minds are open loops. That is, we synchronize via emotional intelligence with other people in the same way that groups of women who live together start having their periods simultaneously. I don’t want to have the whole of civilization contained within me– if that’s the case I would probably nuke myself. The problem with me is that I have civilization as my reality filter, and it often makes me a sad, lonely person. To paraphrase Gandhi, when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, “It would be a good idea!”
The Sun Magazine | Computing The Cost:
Cooper: You’ve quoted Richard Foreman, author of the play The Gods Are Pounding My Head, who says we are turning into “pancake people.”
Carr: We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal — none of us actually fulfilled it — but there was this sense that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. Foreman suggests that we might be replacing that model — for both intelligence and culture — with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We’ll become “pancake people,” with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so easy to find with a mouse click or two.
