Is Google making us stupid?

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

It is not the Internet, or Google, that is making is stupid – it’s our brains. We’ve never been as smart as we’d like to think we are, and the current fashion of looking for reasons why we feel less clever than before partly amounts to a hope to find excuses – someone to blame – for our attention deficits.

It is of course true that there is more information available to us than ever before, and the amount of available information grows exponentially every day. But there has always been more information available than we can comfortably pay attention to, at least since Gutenberg made printed material available to the masses.

What changed are our cultural dispositions in terms of agency and blame – we used to understand that mastering a field took time and effort, and that work was required to filter signal from noise. Now, we blame the noise, even as we no longer invest the time and effort required for mastery of a field.