Scary Thoughts

I've been reading two books lately. One's a Star Trek novel I read some time ago, and the other's a - well, I'd call it science fiction, but I suppose by the current hard-nosed standards its more space-opera than scifi. Certainly it doesn't rely on science fiction tools and environments, though it has its share of hyperspeed-capable ships, intelligent machines, and unspeakably different aliens. The first is Crossroad, by Barbara Hambly; the second is Debatable Space, by Philip Palmer. I mention these not to demonstrate how shallow my reading pool is -- I hear of people who routinely polish off massive books one, two a week, and I am in awe of that -- but because I came across an article whose title resonated with me: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Google's the stalking horse. What they're really asking is, does the easy availability of information have the effect of damaging our ability to comprehend, to summarize large quantities of information. You can see why I would be tickled by that, because I've said in the past that I feel that sort of thing happening to me. I don't read books that are difficult, anymore. Not that I ever did to any great degree, but I did, a little; now, I don't. If I want to read, the odds are that I'll read something simple, like the science fiction/space operas I mentioned, or I'll read something short, like a New Yorker article, or something linear, like a book that talks in straightforward terms about medical science, or about architecture, or about city planning. Its not that I don't like complex thoughts, but my ability to handle them, to hold them up to the light and, however imperfectly, turn them, look at them from different angles, seems to have diminished over the years. I don't know why that is, but I agree that the easy availability of information makes it likely that I now expect to be able to find out things quickly -- to the point that when the web can't do it, I'm left feeling a bit bereft. This afternoon, I wrote a response to a blog which used the word 'vicarious', but I couldn't recall the word, nor could I easily come up with a way to describe it so that a search engine could find it. All I had was a feeling of what the word ought to be, and Google doesn't operate at that level. At least, not yet. I finally did find it, but I had to almost work at it.

Even when reading the article, I found that I was doing almost exactly what they said a lot of people do now -- skipping ahead, looking for key phrases, glancing at summary sentences. I wasn't reading every word, and I certainly wasn't savoring it. I was looking for information, and I wanted it quick, and preferably in an easily digestible format. My motto was Don't Make Me Think Too Hard-- and, you know? That was a little scary.