Experiencing.

To claim that a particular technology has one unique effect, either positive or negative, is to reduce both historically and conceptually the complex causal nexus within which humans and technologies interact and shape each other. Carr’s recent and broadly well-received arguments wondering if Google makes us stupid, for example, rely on a historical parallel that he draws with print. He claims that the invention of printing “caused a more intensive” form of reading and, by extrapolation, print caused a more reflective form of thought—words on a page focused the reader.

Historically speaking, this is hyperbolic techno-determinism. Carr assumes that technologies simply “determine our situation,” independent of human persons, but these very technologies, methods, and media emerge from particular historical situations with their own complex of factors. Carr relies on quick allusions to historians of print to bolster his case and inoculate himself from counter-arguments, but the historian of print to whom he appeals, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, warns that “efforts to summarize changes wrought by printing in any simple or single formula are likely to lead us astray.”

Arguments like Carr’s—and I focus on him because he has become the vocal advocate of this view—also tend to ignore the fact that, historically, print facilitated a range of reading habits and styles. Francis Bacon, himself prone to condemning printed books, laid out at least three ways to read books: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” As a host of scholars have demonstrated of late, different ways of reading co-existed in the print era. Extensive or consultative forms of reading—those that Carr might describe as distracted or unfocused—existed alongside more intensive forms of reading—those that he might describe as deep, careful, prolonged engagements with particular texts in the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century German Pietists read the Bible very closely, but they also consistently consulted Bible concordances and Latin encyclopedias. Even the form of intensive reading held up today as a dying practice, novel reading, was often derided in the eighteenth century as weakening the memory and leading to “habitual distraction,” as Kant put it. It was thought especially dangerous to women who, according to Kant, were already prone to such lesser forms of thought. In short, print did not cause one particular form of reading; instead, it facilitated a range of ever-newer technologies, methods, and innovations that were deeply interwoven with new forms of human life and new ways of experiencing the world.

The problem with suggestions that Google makes us stupid, smart, or whatever else we might imagine, however, is not just their historical myopia. Such reductions elide the fact that Google and print technology do not operate independently of the humans who design, interact with, and constantly modify them, just as humans do not exist independently of technologies. By focusing on technology’s capacity to determine the human (by insisting that Google makes us stupid, that print makes us deeper readers), we risk losing sight of just how deeply our own agency is wrapped up with technology. We forego a more anthropological perspective from which we can observe “the activity of situated people trying to solve local problems.” To emphasize a single and direct causal link between technology and a particular form of thought is to isolate technology from the very forms of life with which it is bound up.

Read the rest at The Hedgehog Review. Thank you, Arts & Letters Daily.