How the Internet is Making Us Less Creative

For the impatient, skip to the end of the article.<p><i>It is the connection between memory and creativity, perhaps, which should make us most wary of the web. ‘As our use of the web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory,’ Carr observes. But conscious manipulation of externally stored information is not enough to yield the deepest of creative breakthroughs: this is what the example of Poincaré suggests. Human memory, unlike machine memory, is dynamic. Through some process we only crudely understand – Poincaré himself saw it as the collision and locking together of ideas into stable combinations – novel patterns are unconsciously detected, novel analogies discovered. And this is the process that Google, by seducing us into using it as a memory prosthesis, threatens to subvert.</i>

All this talk about "outsourcing our memory to machines" sounds like a load of zero-sum thinking. It's not that we're shrinking our biological memories and pushing our memories into machines; instead, we're using the internet as another level of the memory hierarchy, allowing us to work with more information, faster. Why would using the web make it harder for us to store information in our biological memory? If anything, it lets us choose to memorize just the important parts, because we can look up trivial details easily.<p>To use a computer analogy, you could think of our short-term memory as CPU cache, our long-term memory as DRAM, and books as floppy disks. The internet, then, can be compared to a hard drive: much faster than floppies, with a lot more capacity per dollar. (I wonder what would correspond to solid state drives in this analogy. If you can figure out what it is, you can probably make a lot of money by building it. If Google doesn't beat you to it.)<p>A meta-criticism I have of this article is that it doesn't talk about actually measuring the supposed hurtful effects of the internet on creativity. I know this is a hard thing to measure objectively, but there's got to be <i>some</i> way to elevate the discussion above the level of bluster-laden hand-waving about the Scary New Thing. What testable predictions does the article's thesis make? If anybody has ideas here, I'd love to hear them.

Well I for one would rather read a few comments than such a huge long detailed page of script. But I have to say that having scanned the whole page and picked up the key points (I think), it seems to me that the key to the influence on our brains of the internet, or indeed books or any other source of information, is the content itself. I once made a series of radio features for the BBC about children's perceptions of crime. One thing has stayed in my memory - children talking about the impact of watching the news over breakfast. They told me that this left them often shaking with nerves because the focus of the news was so negative - not a good start to the day.<p>I know that if I start reading lots of bad news when I am feeling really good it has an instant impact on my mood. Recently when I got temporarily gripped by the news about the earthquakes in Christchurch I found myself reacting negatively to completely different things and I couldn't understand why, because I had been feeling really good. It was only the next day, when I went back to the news again and the same thing happened, that I figured out what was going on. This is not because I was worried about the news itself (however shocking it was) but because it was fundamentally bad news, and we react to that emotionally usually without even realising it.<p>It seems to me that it is more important to focus on what kind of material we spend time on, whether on computers,in books or elsewhere, and consequently what kind of thoughts and feelings we have during the day, rather than whether it is computers themselves that are having the effect. Although sitting looking at a screen all day definitely has an effect on other things like eyesight, so why not the brain too?<p>As a little aside Bruce Liptom showed that unborn babies experience all the mother's emotions, which sets up many of their main emotional patterns in life. So watch out, mothers-to-be on the internet! You may be affecting your baby's brain.

"Yet he doesn’t answer the question that really concerns us: why is it better to knock information into your head than to get it off the web?"<p>Because <i>you</i> still have to make the connection between things which constitutes a thought. How are you going to connect "What that seventeenth century philosopher Locke said" to "What's been happening in Egypt the last month" if Google is the one that remembers them both?

At some level, I wonder if length of this article is also to make a point... I'm only about halfway through the article.

tl;dr; Woody Allen something something