[Ed. Note: The article referenced in this post has since been published online on the Atlantic Monthly Web site.]

Nick Carr, author of “The Big Switch” and “Is IT Obsolete?” has written “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” and it has been published in the July issue of the Atlantic Monthly. 

Sadly, I called up my local bookstore and they only currently carry the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly, so I can’t give you a well informed critique of Carr’s thoughts.  However, the article is quoted – minimally – by Matt Asay of C|Net.

Of course, there’s a certain amount of irony that Asay seems to use very limited excerpts from Carr’s article to decry the “soundbite culture.” 

Then again, I’m about to give you my thoughts on an article that Asay has read and I haven’t, so if Asay’s article is ironic, this one is downright hypocritical.  So be it.  This seems to be the most important direct quote from Carr’s original article:

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition....The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

Of course you could make the opposite point.  With RSS feeds, news aggregators, and “long tail” blogs, there is also a point to be made that instead of distracting us and diffusing our concentration, we end up hyper-focused on one or two topics to the complete exclusion of everything else.  (The “scattering” effect actually came up quite a bit in my grad-level journalism classes as a defense of the dying newspaper – that you get to see articles you may not have been interested out of the corner of your eye while you read articles that you are interested in.)

But as I mentioned, I haven’t read the entire article; so instead of taking apart Carr’s argument – let’s put forward a new one. 

The limits on network performance then in turn limit the ability to communicate complex thought. 

Let’s start with Twitter.  A twitter post is to information what bumper stickers are to philosophy, at 140 characters, there’s not much that can be done.  But Twitter already suffers from network performance problems and outages presumably related to scale.  If Twitter allowed longer posts, that increases the amount of data traversing across the network. 

You may be asking: So what?  Twitter, at its core, isn’t very different than the “Friends” feature of LiveJournal – and you can post long posts on Livejournal.  This is mostly true, but there is a major difference between Twitter’s model and LiveJournal.  LiveJournal’s “Friends” posts are pulled out of the database at various different times by various readers who actively “pull” the information to their Web browsers.  Twitter, on the other hand, “pushes” the information like an IM client – and does so simultaneously to multiple users.  Twitter’s big selling point is immediacy - latency needs to be low.  Since a single twitter user can have hundreds or even thousands of subscribers… well, you can see the implications.  Twitter’s performance problems may seem incongruous for such a “simple little app” but are actually quite complex.

So, for right now, 140 characters is all that Twitter can handle.  You can blog, you can email, you can IM to express more complex ideas, but because Twitter requires additional demands on the network, the medium’s ability to express complex thought is limited by the performance of the network.

To take a further point, let’s look at YouTube.  There’s another arbitrary limit – 10 minutes or 100MB of data.  Here, the relationship between performance and the limit are a bit more direct; though other video services allow for longer/bigger videos, none of them have the demand that YouTube has. 

But the relationship between complex thought and YouTube is a bit less direct – certainly a complex thought can be expressed in 10 minutes.  Perhaps not completely examined like a book – but certainly expressed.  And comparatively, the 10 minute YouTube video delivers subtlety and nuance to the point where it is replacing the 10 second sound-bite usually found on television.  In this case, the medium’s ability to express complex thought is limited by the performance of the network but is still more informative than the alternative. 

Then again, it’s all about how we use the information; if we used every bit of information in a Cisco Telepresence rig to send text, there would be no human that would be able to parse that much text, that quickly.  The 100MB used for those 10 minutes of YouTube video could also hold the entire text of War and Peace 32 times over. 

To talk about whether the Internet makes you stupid (as SomethingAwful.com has been decrying for years) is to oversimplify a complex idea.  If, during the course of one’s Internet browsing, one is easily distracted when looking for information; this distraction will interfere with your ability to think about things in depth.  On the other hand, if one thinks about things in depth and does not allow for some distraction, one can end up with a deep, but not particularly broad amount of information.  Neither one really decreases your actual intelligence; it’s just the way that one looks at different subjects. 

Eventually I’ll manage to read Mr. Carr’s article and address these points in more depth.  Right now, however, I’m forced to conclude that Google is not making us stupid.

4Chan is making us stupid.