Attack of the Pancake People RR#5 Jeff Richmond

Is Google Making Us Stupid? A provocative title and a colorful way to bring up the topic Nicholas Carr presents in his article. Carr mills over the idea that access to information, not just the access but the saturation of it, is bringing us to a point where large articles and books are being disregarded, or even avoided for small succinct bits of information. It is hard not to see his point as my mind started to wander even when reading his rather short and well written article. He comes at his point from many different angles, but one that really caught my attention was his statement “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set of within our own minds.” Technology is driving this experience to the point of extinction. It is blatant to me that Carr seems to be saying a sentimental goodbye to his love for writings like the novel. It is not just Carr's point to say what we are missing but what it is doing to us. He goes on to quote a playwright Richard Forman “We risk being turning into “pancake-people”--spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information access by the mere touch of a button.” The deep connection to the things we read are changing. Carr even goes as far to make mention of Friedrich Netzsche's experience with his typewriter and how it seemed to change his writing. The device itself seemed to bring to a short truncated form of writing that a friend made notice of. I would have to think that his point is not just the fact that it is changing the way we read, but the way we think. Carr also brings up some old fears up. Socrates makes mention of his fear that the written word will detract from our memory as oratory fades away to written word. He was right, but how could he foresee how it would change our development as we had the ability to store information more readily. Do we face a similar experience?
All the great quotes and ideas that Carr brings to the the table are swaying, but for me it comes back to Socrates. We may be changing, and more rapidly then we have ever before, but for me I feel it is analogs to the change from the oral tradition to written word. One may think about how we are stepping away from they way things have been and habits are changing and those changes seem to be disruptive by comparison to the way things have been, but will we trade the way we have been doing things for a new way? Much like Socrates seeing the written word catch on and watching a tradition that was long held and healthy being shed. He could not foresee what the written word would do for us. We ourselves might be at a similar impasse. Will tech and the internet change the way we consume information? I would say that question has already been answered, but the thought that strikes me is will the way we read be distinguishable from the way we will read in the not so distant future? Are we seeing the first wave of many in the sea of technological change? Out of our mind into the world these things will effect us more than we know and Carr knows it.