Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village—particularly in its digital-age variant—makes information ubiquitous, universal, instantaneous, and continuous, stoking in audiences a strong and ceaseless appetite for the Now. Whatever you know is already out of date. Even knowing the Now is not enough. We need to know the Next—which is, of course, impossible. Nothing is so marketable as Next, the desire for which can never be quenched. Unless we have broken McLuhan’s Narcissus Trance and seen that the medium has engineered this appetite, the appetite is normalized—we see our voraciousness as natural and necessary. We live in the grips of FOMO (fear of missing out) and the anxiety of ICYMI (in case you missed it).
Nicholas Carr believes that digital media—Google in particular, but also its social-media compatriots at Facebook and Twitter—both create and further leverage our addiction to Now and Next. They foster in us habits of ultra-efficient quantitative information consumption. We want Next, we want it quickly, and we want more of it. Information efficiency is almost indistinguishable from information addiction. And in the race for quantity and speed, we sacrifice quality. We look for instant answers, and Google seems to give us an easy method for finding them. We seek, and we find. There is little space in the interstices between seeking and finding for contemplation and questioning.
In this way, Carr’s anxiety about the drive toward absolute information efficiency resembles Max Horkheimer’s dyspepsia about a mass society in which ideas are verdicts—completed intellectual commodities—rather than open-ended thoughts that engage us in the productive work of creative, critical thinking. When we become a republic of verdicts, discussion gives way to argument, and the argument cannot be bridged. In Horkheimer’s view, these verdicts can only be accepted or rejected rather than negotiated or rethought. There is no space for thought, growth or change, only for thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or self-exile from the field of intellectual play. Our range of agency is restricted and our minds stifled.
Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid” posits a digital-media fueled Republic of Answers akin to Horkheimer’s Republic of Verdicts. The Silicon Valley-engineered social value of the Fast Answer swamps the humanistic process of the Slow Question—the open-ended inquiry that characterize thought. The dopamine-fueled cycle of search-and-reward replaces the anxious wanderlust of contemplation. The search itself no longer fulfills. And Google, as Carr says, begins to make us stupid.
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