Reading Response #2

Victor Volz
April 14, 2010
English 100: Introduction to Academic Writing

Nicholas Carr has recently presented a conjecture which proposes that the globally popular search engine, Google™, has been possibly lowering our intelligence with the ever-increasing reliability we’ve placed upon online search engines, such as Google™, to answer all of our questions and retrieve any information that is required in the blink of an eye. He maintains that this has caused us to become much more impulsive, impatient and expectant of instant gratification when accessing information due to the preciseness of Google™ locating the exact data that we needed, without having to sift through a lot of otherwise irrelevant information. The corollary of such an effect is that our attention has now become a kind of commodity; instead of the information per se. Carr centralizes his theme around the previously mentioned predicate as well as later colligating the questionable arguments in how the arrival of other new information technologies are, in his opinion, beginning to transform our cognitive and thinking processes. While I think we should all be highly inquisitive and skeptical of this ostentatious assertion, I do concur that these technological tools may very well be initiating the reworking of our cerebrating routines.

Carr claims that he identifies his process of thinking of being altered, and also tells us how other fellow bloggers, readers and researchers have been able to relate to his recent situation and/or predicament. The problem originated by the fast-paced retrieval of information online, he avers that at one point he could read entire lengths of books with relative ease and now has difficulty reading past the first few pages of them before his caprice forces him to check into other things, or try to immediately locate the exact datum, fact, or piece of information that he had been searching for. While I fairly understand Carr’s point of view on the subject, I don’t find his argument and subsequent evidence to be very convincing, Google does not appear at least to me, to be lowering my aptitude, at least I am not aware of it, but I guess it may be hard to actually be attentive of such an alteration, I is just used much more frequently as resource tool for things that I didn’t really need to know in such great detail. In fact, I believe the contrary is perhaps true, these information technologies I believe will eventually give way to entirely new technologies in the future, which will enhance, amplify, and augment our intelligence and other cognitive capacities, at least that is my hypothesis, which I will supplementary explain later on in the passage.

Carr did express some ideas that I do earnestly agree with, and touch on some subjects that I found immensely fascinating, for instance, in his essay Carr gives us a term that is outstanding to me, this term being the: “Information Age” which describes the purportedly current technological age that we are in, however, from my own personal research, I have found that recent proposals advocate that we are now quickly transitioning, yet again, into an “Attention Age” in which because there is an overabundance of information nowadays, and our attention has now become much more prized to people then extracting knowledge from people themselves, whereas decades ago, information, whether really extraneous or not, was placed at high value. A fantastic example of this idea of informational advancement to ruminate about is given by this quote taken from Karl Fisch’s famously publicized video clip “Did You Know”, “It is estimated that a week’s worth of New York Times… contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.” (Fisch, 2007) “Web 2.0” sites and social media networking sites that spawned throughout the 2000s is mostly the cause of this attention deficit. Carr also briefly touches on the subject when he says, after writing about the subject of how we absorb a bunch of trifling media content and digital gimcracks, “The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.” (Carr, 2008) which is a tiny key point he mentioned that I’d like to reference due to what I recognize as its importance. Actually, the attention age idea itself that I introduced earlier was first presented in a doctrine by some “CEO” and corporate president guy named Rich Schefren in what appears to be some amateur, lame, meretricious entrepreneurial scam of some sort, trying to persuade the consumer that there is helpful information in this manifesto about the supposed upcoming technological age. So while it may not be authorial evidence in the nearest sense, regardless, in my opinion it still sounds like a viable next commodity in our consumerist world.

For some further elucidation on the matter and to give a clear overview of how these technological ages have progressed, I will illustrate a tentative list that I have contrived from information that I had gathered over the course of reading various articles on technological change. This will put into perspective approximately how far we have roughly advanced since our Neanderthal, nomadic tribal days in terms of economic and technological prosperity.

Foraging/Hunter-Gatherer Age: 600000 BC – 100000 BC (About 590000 Years)
Horticultural Age: 100000 BC – 4000 BC (About 96000 Years)
Agrarian/Agricultural Age: 4000 BC – 1760 AD (About 5760 Years)
Industrial Age: 1760 – 1980 (About 220 Years)
Information Age: 1980 – 2010? (About 30 Years, Perhaps)
Attention Age?: 2010 - ? (Based on previous data, probably much less than 30 years)

The list of ages that I’ve compiled are not precise of course, and the classifications, or ages of technology which I have cited are currently subject to controversy if whether or not they consist of the paramount influence for that particular point in time. Also, to remediate other established influential ages we’ve probably heard of before, let us consider this instead, for instance, I’ll reckon the Stone, Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages to be within, as ‘sub-ages’, of the Foraging/Hunter-Gatherer Age, and the Medieval, Middle, and Renaissance Ages to be sub-ages of the Agrarian/Agricultural Age, and the Atomic, Nuclear, and Space Ages to be sub-ages of the Industrial Age, etc. But you may disagree about how I grouped certain technologies as not quite as instigative as compared to others. If so, that’s fine, although I hope all these technological eras and other nomenclature doesn’t confound anyone and imply or pressure someone to resort to what may be considered an insular perspective for using such categorical thinking. But this outline can still be used as an essential demarcation to display how the increments of technological transcendence shorten (apparently exponentially) with each consecutive technological revolution. Each technological constituent listed as an age, is representative of what is deemed to be the principal economic and/or scientific force for that specific period.

Presently, economists and technological researchers believe that information is the most crucial article of trade on the economic plane, but this critical position may very soon, if not already, be given to attention. I may be, however, jumping the gun on this whole, hopping on to the ‘attention’ bandwagon thing, but it seems to be attracting a lot of professional attention in the field, so I’ll continue prattling on about it, I may be just wrong about the whole thing altogether anyways. Now, in theory, the whole technological system works something like this. We reside in our homes, which is a place where we put, hoard, forage and gather our belongings/stuff/things. Since horticulture allows us to settle down and no longer remain peripatetic, and the vital biological and physiological need to eat to sustain ourselves and survive has been relatively effortless to cater to given that the inception of agricultural techniques, which have allowed us to acquire a greater provision of food, makes it so simple, just go drive down to your local hypermarket and purchase their merchandise, as easy as that. Now, industries have supplied our homes and other infrastructure with numerous additional products and items to gladden our other emotional and psychological needs that aren’t quite as necessary, but still generally requested, e.g., entertainment, education, etc. In one instance we can look at the example of industries providing us with a computer, in which utilizing one now consumes most of the average person’s time, and when connected to the internet, (since who uses a computer without the internet anymore?) we can access information. However, we now have a superfluous amount of information, in which case it is lately becoming much more oriented and geared towards our preferences in order to capture our valuable attention, now what grabs our attention is what uses up most of our precious time. It still seems to all revolve around the matter of time. Perhaps we can prolong our life-span’s indefinitely to have more time to do other enjoyable and appealing activities, if it is a desideratum, well, that’s a whole other story. Anyways, after attention, intelligence may seem to be the next technological factor that is going to be modified, well, that’s my prediction.

Each technological step, or leap, focuses on compartmentalizing, as well as holistically changing our lifestyle. The mere detail of technological change is getting smaller in scale, and likewise is becoming more pronounced. Soon, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and even nanotechnology (commonly cited and hyped by futurists as the next big four revolutionary technologies) is going to be introduced into mainstream and popular use, technologies that we can’t even perceive, will be omnipresent in our ever-changing world. The fascinating and surprising evolution of technological acceleration leaves us to ponder about the question, what’s next? And how fast will this rate of acclimatization increase? It is apparent from all this that the rate of ingenious and innovative inventions being produced is increasing tremendously with the passing of time All in all, I went off on a rather long divergence from the main topic, but I believe it addresses an important point that ties in with Carr’s primary theme, that being that while technologies like Google may apparently, in certain respects, be ‘dumbing’ us down, I on the other hand believe that we will be heading towards a rapid trend of being transformed by technology, transformed in a way that we will eventually become smartened up, so much so to the degree that human beings will no longer subsist in their natural form, computerized machines will gain and exceed our intellectual parameters, if they’re able to harness our ability to be adaptable and improvise. We will be inevitably coerced to merge with them or die as an incognizant and nescient being, as computerized human hybrids, cyborg-like creatures, for those who follow fiction, will continue to march on tractably to the societal system, being the successor to humans as the ascendant intellectual breed. I do agree with Carr – even though I may be taking it a little bit out of context when he cites that, “That’s the essence of Kurbrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” (Carr, 2008)

References:
· Andrieu, J (2007). “Leaving The Information Age”
· Carr, N (2008). “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Atlantic Magazine.
· Fisch, K (2007). “Did You Know; Shift Happens – Globalization; Information Age”
· Javed, A (2010). “Social Media in the Attention Age”