Is Google Making Us Stupid?/GA1 - Background

Background

Prior to the publication of Carr's Atlantic essay, critics had long been concerned about the potential for electronic media to supplant literary reading. In 1994, American academic Sven Birkerts published a book titled The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, consisting of a collection of essays that declaimed against the declining influence of literary culture — the tastes in literature that are favored by a social group — with a central premise among the essays asserting that alternative delivery formats for the book are inferior to the paper incarnation. Birkerts was spurred to write the book after his experience with a class he taught in the fall of 1992, where the students had little appreciation for the literature he had assigned them, stemming from, in his opinion, their inaptitude for the variety of skills involved in deep reading. In "Perseus Unbound", an essay from the book, Birkerts presented several reservations toward the application of interactive technologies to educational instruction, cautioning that the "long-term cognitive effects of these new processes of data absorption" were unknown and that they could yield "an expansion of the short-term memory banks and a correlative atrophying of long-term memory".

In 2007, developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf took up the cause of defending reading and print culture in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, approaching the subject matter from a scientific angle in contrast to Birkerts' cultural-historical angle. A few reviewers were critical of Wolf for only touching upon the Internet's potential impact on reading in her book; however, in essays published concurrent with the book's release she elaborated upon her worries. In an essay in The Boston Globe, Wolf expressed her grave concern that the development of knowledge in children who are heavy users of the Internet could produce mere "decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes", and cautioned that the web's "immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge". In an essay published by Powell's Books, Wolf contended that some of the reading brain's strengths could be lost in future generations "if children are not taught first to read, and to think deeply about their reading, and only then to e-read". Preferring to maintain an academic perspective, Wolf firmly asserted that her speculations have not yet been scientifically verified but deserved serious study.

In Carr's 2008 book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, the material in the final chapter, "iGod", provided a basis for his later Atlantic magazine article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The inspiration to write "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" came from the difficulties Carr found he had in remaining engaged with not only books he had to read but even books that he found very interesting. This is sometimes called deep reading, a term coined by academic Sven Birkerts in his book The Gutenberg Elegies and later defined by developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf with an added cognitive connotation.