Business Tools Blog

The Atlantic ran the following cover story in their July/August issue: Is Google Making us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr writes:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

He quotes playwright Richard Foreman:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality-a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

It’s interesting that so many people are writing about the Internet changing the way people think and learn.  Rather than fight it, or lament the passing of the old way of learning, IMHO - we need to embrace this change.  We need to reshape our businesses to be in sych with these changes.