How is the Internet changing the way we think?

The Edge has just published the responses to its annual question - which is the title of this post. I have just managed to read through the first dozen essays (you can find them here), and found two that I think are particularly interesting for we teachnologists, one by Jonas Mekas and one by Kevin Kelly. As a teaser, here's an excerpt from Kelly's essay:

"(The internet) is one thing now, an intermedia with 2 billion screens peering into it. The whole ball of connections — including all its books, all its pages, all its tweets, all its movies, all its games, all its posts, all its streams — is like one vast global book (or movie, etc.), and we are only beginning to learn how to read it. Knowing that this large thing is there, and that I am in constant communication with it, has changed how I think."

Enjoy! JR

What does Google make us?

I know everyone is impatient for vacation to be over, so we can get back to school. I thought it might be time for a new post, to get us thinking teachnologically, in the meantime...

NPR ran a story this morning with Nicholas Carr (who wrote "Is Google Making Us Stupid" published in the Atlantic last summer). NPR and Carr examine the ways that writers are adapting to the new digital platforms readers are using - and how their writing styles change when they are writing for cell phones or Twitter or the Kindle. NPR interviews writers who are now creating tweet and cell phone stories, and those writers describe how they have to write more poetically (one writer says "writing for 140 character tweets is like writing haiku") and with more punch and impact. This in itself is worthy of a teachnology discussion.

For background, you can read the original "Is Google Making Us Stupid" and several rebuttals here, at The Edge (a great blog, that by its very existence shows how new media can expand and broaden intellectual discussions on various topics).

Here's a sampling of Carr's thesis: "For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. 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..."

Here's a sampling from Clay Shirky's rebuttal to Carr's view of the internet: "...the anxiety at the heart of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” doesn’t actually seem to be about thinking, or even reading, but culture. Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion. But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting."