It is the connection between memory and creativity, perhaps, which should make us most wary of the web. ‘As our use of the web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory,’ Carr observes. But conscious manipulation of externally stored information is not enough to yield the deepest of creative breakthroughs: this is what the example of Poincaré suggests. Human memory, unlike machine memory, is dynamic. Through some process we only crudely understand – Poincaré himself saw it as the collision and locking together of ideas into stable combinations – novel patterns are unconsciously detected, novel analogies discovered. And this is the process that Google, by seducing us into using it as a memory prosthesis, threatens to subvert.
To use a computer analogy, you could think of our short-term memory as CPU cache, our long-term memory as DRAM, and books as floppy disks. The internet, then, can be compared to a hard drive: much faster than floppies, with a lot more capacity per dollar. (I wonder what would correspond to solid state drives in this analogy. If you can figure out what it is, you can probably make a lot of money by building it. If Google doesn't beat you to it.)
A meta-criticism I have of this article is that it doesn't talk about actually measuring the supposed hurtful effects of the internet on creativity. I know this is a hard thing to measure objectively, but there's got to be some way to elevate the discussion above the level of bluster-laden hand-waving about the Scary New Thing. What testable predictions does the article's thesis make? If anybody has ideas here, I'd love to hear them.
I know that if I start reading lots of bad news when I am feeling really good it has an instant impact on my mood. Recently when I got temporarily gripped by the news about the earthquakes in Christchurch I found myself reacting negatively to completely different things and I couldn't understand why, because I had been feeling really good. It was only the next day, when I went back to the news again and the same thing happened, that I figured out what was going on. This is not because I was worried about the news itself (however shocking it was) but because it was fundamentally bad news, and we react to that emotionally usually without even realising it.
It seems to me that it is more important to focus on what kind of material we spend time on, whether on computers,in books or elsewhere, and consequently what kind of thoughts and feelings we have during the day, rather than whether it is computers themselves that are having the effect. Although sitting looking at a screen all day definitely has an effect on other things like eyesight, so why not the brain too?
As a little aside Bruce Liptom showed that unborn babies experience all the mother's emotions, which sets up many of their main emotional patterns in life. So watch out, mothers-to-be on the internet! You may be affecting your baby's brain.
Because you still have to make the connection between things which constitutes a thought. How are you going to connect "What that seventeenth century philosopher Locke said" to "What's been happening in Egypt the last month" if Google is the one that remembers them both?
