Nicholas Carr has an interesting article in the new Atlantic, provocatively headlined, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” His thesis is that the Internet — not really Google per se — is shortening attention spans and making it more difficult to concentrate on longer pieces of writing. There’s probably something to this, although, as he notes, previous shifts in technology — the development of the typewriter in the 19th century, the development of writing in ancient times — also occasioned much handwringing about whether they would cause a fall in moral and intellectual standards.

For my part, I haven’t noticed my attention flagging because of the Internet. What I have noticed is that the Internet makes it much easier to produce longer pieces of writing. Google, especially, is invaluable, and not only because it enables anyone to look up obscure facts with a few keystrokes. Another function of Google is less famous but growing in importance for those of us in the book-writing biz — namely its “book” search function. Google has digitized thousands of volumes, allowing researchers to easily find obscure tomes. While no preview is available of many recently published books, and others offer only a “snippet view,” growing numbers of books whose copyright have lapsed are available in “full” search mode, meaning that you can, if you so desire, read the entire book online — or, more likely, print it out.

I have found this to be in invaluable resource while researching my new history of guerrilla warfare. It used to take me a long time to get books via interlibrary loan, and then the 19th century volumes usually arrived in very poor conditions. Now for nothing more than the cost of the paper and ink I can get printer-fresh copies of General Phil Sheridan’s memoirs, George Macaulay Trevelyan’s classic volumes on Garibaldi, or the Rev. James Gordon’s “History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the Year 1798.” Moreover, if necessary, I can use Google to search for keywords inside the books.

This is a huge and growing boon for scholars or interested readers, and it is the product not of a traditional nonprofit library but of a decidedly profit-making business. Thanks, Google, for making me-and lots of others-smarter. Of course whether readers raised on the Internet will be interested in reading what I or other authors produce is another question.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 11:56 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.