2 27 17 Why Google isn t making us Stupid or Smart by Chad Wellmon Articles claim that we live in an age of information superabundance o 300B emails 200M tweets 2 5B texts o Astronomers surveying the sky w Sloan telescope in NM released over 49 5 Terabytes of info mass of images measurements in one data drop Large Hadron Collider CERN the European Organization for Nuclear Research produces about this much info per sec o World s info base is estimated to double every 11 hours o Decade ago comp profs spoke of kilo mega now tera peta exa zetta yotta Ea 1000x bigger than the last Info either abundance or overload o Advent of digital info era of big data allows Geneticists to decode the human genome Humanists search bodies of literature Businesses spot economic trends o Create sense for how we are being overwhelmed by info o Fm embodied human perspective scales of info are meaningless o We don t experience info as pure data but as filtered and framed thru the keyboards screens touchpads of our digital techs Awe worry obscures the ways in which we actually engage in it the world o Chatter about info superabundance overload tend to marginalize human persons render tech o Email is reduced to another data point web to an infinite complex of protocols machinery o Google to neutral machine for prod info o Compulsive talk about info overload can isolate and abstract digi tech fm society humans and broad culture o Task of our digital age lies in cultivating contact w an increasingly technologically formed world To understand we need to consider info not only in the abstract terms of terra zetta but in cultural terms Analytical task lies in identifying embracing forms of human agency to our digi age w o reducing tech to a mere mechanical extension of the human to a mere tool Two Narratives o 1 those who claim that digitization efforts to google Fb era of big data finally realizing the dream to unify all knowledge Internet is a network of interlinked web pages etc that are visible to all ppl Info age is unique not only in scale but in its open and democratic arrangement of info info has been set free Digi tech claim most optimistic among us Deliver a universal knowledge that ll make us smarter liberate us Claims related to similar visions about a trans humanist future in which tech will overcome what were once the historical limits of humanity phys intellectual psychological Dream is post human era o 2 less sanguine observers interpret the advent of digitalization and big data as portending an age of info overload Many worry that hyperlinks have all created a culture of distraction Techs that help us all manage this info are undermining our ability to read w depth or care Web is deeply flawed medium that facilitates a less intensive more superficial form of reading Superabundance of info is changing the way we think Net chipping away capacity for concentration contemplation Mind now expects to take in info the way the net distributes it Constant distractions of the internet are degrading our ability to pay sustained attn read in depth reflect remember Quantity over quality o Ea narrative points to real changes in how tech impacts humans Both scale acceleration of info production dissemination in our digi age are unique o Two mistakes 1 imagine our info age to be unprecedented but info explosions the utopian apocalyptic pronouncements that accompany them are an old concern emergence of new info brings new methods modes for storing transmitting more info 2 make a key conceptual error by isolating the causal effects of technology Simple claims about the effects of tech obscure basic assumptions about tech as an independent cause that eclipses causes of other kinds Assume effects of tech can be easily isolated abstracted fm their social historical contexts o Browsers hyperlinks etc help us all filtter the essential fm the excess search for what we want o Tech is the very manner in which humans engage the world To celebrate the web or any other tech is to ignore the human scale Our indiv access to this imagined expanse of pure info made possible by techs constructed based on human decisions experiences o The web doesn t exist history of info overload is instructive less for what it eaches us about the quantity of info than what it teaches us about how tech we design to engage the world come in turn to shape us o History of info overload is how we know what we know Too Many Books o Complains gained urgency over the course of the 18 th century when book market exploded esp in England France Germany o Anxiety corresponded to a rapid incr in new print titles in the last 1 3 of 18 th cent incr about 150 1702 Christian descry the writing book business as a kind of epidemic disease Perception of an excess of books was motivated by a more basic assumption about who should and should know write them o end of century book dealers began to weary of a market growing out of control o Johann 0 no nation has printed as much as Germans Overabundance of books encouraged ppl to read a lot superficially Extensive reading fostered bad reading habits more patholofical condition o true knowledge 1 presumed some unstated yet normative level of info or some normative of books 2 laments presumed the normative value of particular practices techs for dealing w all the books and all the info o Every complaint followed by a proposal on how to fix prob Enlightment Reading Techs o Germans had a range of techs and methods for dealing w the proliferation of print Made incr amts of print more manageable by helping readers to select summarize and organize an ever increasing store of info Late 17th 18th cent EU readers dealt w influx of new titles lack of funds by creating virtual libraries called bibliotheca Avoid reading whole books by providing summaries of indiv books 18th cent made incr array of encyclopedias Biblical concordance 1247 indexed every word of the Bible use for sermons All techs managed to resources money time o Some overwhelmed by tech other complain this led to a 2 nd hand form of knowledge o Echo contemporary concerns about how our reliance on google wiki might lead to superficial forms of knowledge o Herder worried techs reduced knowledge to discrete units of info o Suggests to claim that aparticular tech has 1 unique effect either positive or negative is to reduce both historically conceptually the complex causal nexus w in which humans techs interact n shape ea other o Carr claims that the invention of