On September 25, 2008, Nicholas Carr appeared on the Colbert Report to promote his new book. In the interview, he speaks of an evolution of the Internet into a “worldwide computer,” and talks about the increase of people using the Internet as an online storage space instead of their individual computer. Carr says that the Internet and Google are useful, but he also sees a problem due to how much the Internet is used. Carr’s concern is that people are starting to think like the Internet. That we are ‘starting to act like the tools we use,’ and “think like a computer,” “jumping from piece of information to piece of information.”
Carr thinks that we are losing the ability to think deeply because of the Internet. I find this laughable.
Carr believes that the Internet has caused people to lose the ability to stay focused on one thing, that we are losing our ability to concentrate, reflect, and contemplate. He is concerned we are losing our ability to “slow down and think.” Carr suggests that “we’ve become so connected to everything, that we are actually disconnected from any one thing.” He says he has noticed that when he reads a paper book, “something that used to come naturally,” he finds that his mind ‘starts to wander’ and wants to do what it does when he is online.
The Internet does allow us to quickly jump quickly between sources of information. But this is not the same thing as the “superficial relationship with information” that Carr is afraid of. The Internet permits the exact opposite of a “superficial relationship,” because it allows an individual to look beyond any one source of information, and produce their own connections between the material they find. The investigation of related information is a form of deeper thinking. It can be the contemplation of one subject, at a far deeper level.
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