Courtesy of JP’s blog, a stimulating article by Nicholas Carr - Is Google Making Us Stupid? - along with a set of rejoinders on The Edge from the likes of George Dyson and Jaron Lanier.

I like the article a lot (it passes all my criteria for non-fiction writing I wrote about a couple of weeks back). There’s a self-consciously contrarian side to it that goes too far - Carr seems to suggest there’s an evil conspiracy amongst software developers in general and Google in particular to overthrow Civilization As We Know It. I don’t think there’s an argument with his key thesis - that the nature of the way we interact with information on the web, and the way it’s replacing the sustained narrative of the media of yore with a multiplicity of fragments of information, changes the way we structure our attention, and changes the structure of thought and hence the mind. I’m not going to comment on it directly (read it!), but here are some of the resonances that it evoked for me, from my own experience and from other bits of reading and thinking I’ve done over the past few years

(From another response to a response to Carr’s article. Read the whole thread here.)

In the words of Herbert Simon, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Concentration is a skill. It takes something to pay attention to one thing and one thing only for an extended period of time. Musicians, painters, writes, artists understand this, and the practice of all these domains is full of tricks and techniques to get into “the zone”. As a musician with a day job, I’ve experienced what it means to spend days and weeks in interrupt mode as part of a management team, then trying to practice guitar for a couple of hours. It’s scarily easy to lose the habit of concentration, and worth developing and maintaining personal practices that give us the chance to do this.

In the his brilliant essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Edward Tufte identifies another poison in the system - comprehensively illustrating the way that bullet-point style, large fonts and low information densities are eroding our abilities to interpret data (the recasting of the Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation is a classic, but the killer example is the set of slides used to support analysis during the ill-fated Columbia space shuttle flight in January 2003. Tufte introduces the analysis thus: “Our evidence begins with a case study of 3 PowerPoint presentations directed to NASA officials who were making some important decisions during the final flight … those presentations contain several intellectual failures in engineering analysis … the PP damage to these presentations turns out to reflect widespread problems in technical communication by means of PP, according to the final report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board”.

Steve Freeman has a great post on Test Driven Development where he argues: “it makes a cognitive difference whether you write the tests first or the code”. I know I think about code differently if I’m working test-first, and now find it discomforting to work any other way - but I also know that without the complementary practices of pairing and refactoring, test-first is just as likely to lead to opaque and intractable systems as any other approach. I see many test-first efforts getting the tests to run and then never refactoring to reach the point of design simplicity that’s the real meaning of “do the simplest thing that could possibly work”.

The Slow Food movement is a reaction to the culture-damaging effects of fast food (and there are many other slow movements). Do we need a Slow Information movement (is this what a book group is, or could be part of?), a Slow Coding movement?

It’s not a big stretch to accept that the nature of the technology we grow up with shapes the structure of our minds - the rise of writing changed our relationship with memory, accurate clocks our experience of time, and printed and electronic media both the extent of our awareness of events and things in the world and the sheer quantity of information we now face. I’m tempted by Clay Shirky’s optimism - he reminds us that all the great technology shifts have been accompanied with dire warnings of cataclysm. In most cases the fears turn out to be well founded - slaves are freed, women get to vote, people get rights - but the benefits of the revolution so far outweigh the drawbacks that we end up in credit. It’s also entirely characteristic that those who started their education being moulded by a previous era’s technology should be particularly apprehensive in the face of new generations unencumbered by the past who may - really - think in a very different way. However if individuals in the (increasingly) educated world lose the ability to be absorbed, what does this mean for research in all areas of science, for the creation and appreciation of art, for relationships from the personal to the supra-national? Will the ability to absorb, reflect, intuit deep connections, invent, become - even more than now - a rare skill? Will that skill be devalued, lost in the web’s cloud of observation, opinion, comment, reaction? What price mindfulness in the age of Twitter and Facebook?