When you store things digitally, you actually lose them
Over the last twenty four hours I read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which left me concerned that, despite degrees from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, I am on a path toward a brain that doesn’t work.
The idea. Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media and partly the inspiring philosophy of Carr’s work, argues that our tools end up numbing whatever part of our body they “amplify.” The power loom left weavers without manual dexterity. The mechanical plows left farmers with no tactile understanding of soil. Carr explores the next application of this thesis: if computers and the internet are meant to amplify the brain, do they also numb it?
Previous inventions–the book and the calculator–enabled greater human understanding and materially advanced the cause of mankind, Carr argues. With the book, humans were able to communicate (write) and understand (read) across time and place, eliminating the need to obtain a rare physical copy or, even worse, find someone to recite it. With the calculator, students could stop spending hours on long division and instead devote time to calculus. But the internet is different: it enables us to outsource our brains - or at least the entire set of facts, images, and stories – to external storage. Although this outsourcing might seem efficient because it allows humans to focus on higher order thinking (e.g. combining the images, telling narratives with the facts, etc.), outsourcing actually robs us of the very act that enables us to do the higher order thinking in the first place: the neural process of committing “data” from short term memory to long term memory. While remembering things seems unnecessary and even irrational in an age of cloud storage, failing to do so actually leaves us incapable of doing anything meaningful with that memory. Continue Reading →
