Chad Wellmon, The Hedgehog Review: Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012)
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), however, produces almost that much information per second. Last year alone, the world’s information base is estimated to have doubled every eleven hours. Just a decade ago, computer professionals spoke of kilobytes and megabytes. Today they talk of the terabyte, the petabyte, the exabyte, the zettabyte, and now the yottabyte, each a thousand times bigger than the last.
Some see this as information abundance, others as information overload. The advent of digital information and with it the era of big data allows geneticists to decode the human genome, humanists to search entire bodies of literature, and businesses to spot economic trends. But it is also creating for many the sense that we are being overwhelmed by information. How are we to manage it all? What are we to make, as Ann Blair asks, of a zettabyte of information—a one with 21 zeros after it?1 From a more embodied, human perspective, these tremendous scales of information are rather meaningless. We do not experience information as pure data, be it a byte or a yottabyte, but as filtered and framed through the keyboards, screens, and touchpads of our digital technologies. However impressive these astronomical scales of information may be, our contemporary awe and increasing worry about all this data obscures the ways in which we actually engage it and the world of which it and we are a part. All of the chatter about information superabundance and overload tends not only to marginalize human persons, but also to render technology just as abstract as a yottabyte. An email is reduced to yet another data point, the Web to an infinite complex of protocols and machinery, Google to a neutral machine for producing information. Our compulsive talk about information overload can isolate and abstract digital technology from society, human persons, and our broader culture. We have become distracted by all the data and inarticulate about our digital technologies.
The more pressing, if more complex, task of our digital age, then, lies not in figuring out what comes after the yottabyte, but in cultivating contact with an increasingly technologically formed world.2 In order to understand how our lives are already deeply formed by technology, we need to consider information not only in the abstract terms of terrabytes and zettabytes, but also in more cultural terms. How do the technologies that humans form to engage the world come in turn to form us? What do these technologies that are of our own making and irreducible elements of our own being do to us? The analytical task lies in identifying and embracing forms of human agency particular to our digital age, without reducing technology to a mere mechanical extension of the human, to a mere tool. In short, asking whether Google makes us stupid, as some cultural critics recently have, is the wrong question. It assumes sharp distinctions between humans and technology that are no longer, if they ever were, tenable.
Two Narratives
The history of this mutual constitution of humans and technology has been obscured as of late by the crystallization of two competing narratives about how we experience all of this information. On the one hand, there are those who claim that the digitization efforts of Google, the social-networking power of Facebook, and the era of big data in general are finally realizing that ancient dream of unifying all knowledge. The digital world will become a “single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas,” a form of knowledge without distinctions or differences.3 Unlike other technological innovations, like print, which was limited to the educated elite, the internet is a network of “densely interlinked Web pages, blogs, news articles and Tweets [that] are all visible to anyone and everyone.”4 Our information age is unique not only in its scale, but in its inherently open and democratic arrangement of information. Information has finally been set free. Digital technologies, claim the most optimistic among us, will deliver a universal knowledge that will make us smarter and ultimately liberate us.5 These utopic claims are related to similar visions about a trans-humanist future in which technology will overcome what were once the historical limits of humanity: physical, intellectual, and psychological. The dream is of a post-human era.6
On the other hand, less sanguine observers interpret the advent of digitization and big data as portending an age of information overload. We are suffering under a deluge of data. Many worry that the Web’s hyperlinks that propel us from page to page, the blogs that reduce long articles to a more consumable line or two, and the tweets that condense thoughts to 140 characters have all created a culture of distraction. The very technologies that help us manage all of this information are undermining our ability to read with any depth or care. The Web, according to some, is a deeply flawed medium that facilitates a less intensive, more superficial form of reading. When we read online, we browse, we scan, we skim. The superabundance of information, such critics charge, however, is changing not only our reading habits, but also the way we think. As Nicholas Carr puts it, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”7 The constant distractions of the internet—think of all those hyperlinks and new message warnings that flash up on the screen—are degrading our ability “to pay sustained attention,” to read in depth, to reflect, to remember. For Carr and many others like him, true knowledge is deep, and its depth is proportional to the intensity of our attentiveness. In our digital world that encourages quantity over quality, Google is making us stupid.
Each of these narratives points to real changes in how technology impacts humans. Both the scale and the acceleration of information production and dissemination in our digital age are unique. Google, like every technology before it, may well be part of broader changes in the ways we think and experience the world. Both narratives, however, make two basic mistakes.
First, they imagine our information age to be unprecedented, but information explosions and the utopian and apocalyptic pronouncements that accompany them are an old concern. The emergence of every new information technology brings with it new methods and modes for storing and transmitting ever more information, and these technologies deeply impact the ways in which humans interact with the world. Both the optimism of technophiles who predict the emergence of a digital “liquid” intelligence and the pessimism of those who fear that Google is “making us stupid” echo historical hopes and complaints about large amounts of information.
Second, both narratives make a key conceptual error by isolating the causal effects of technology. Technologies, be it the printed book or Google, do not make us unboundedly free or unflaggingly stupid. Such a sharp dichotomy between humans and technology simplifies the complex, unpredictable, and thoroughly historical ways in which humans and technologies interact and form each other. Simple claims about the effects of technology obscure basic assumptions, for good or bad, about technology as an independent cause that eclipses causes of other kinds. They assume the effects of technology can be easily isolated and abstracted from their social and historical contexts.
Instead of thinking in such dichotomies or worrying about all of those impending yottabytes, we might consider a perhaps simple but oftentimes overlooked fact: we access, use, and engage information through technologies that help us select, filter, and delimit. Web browsers, hyperlinks, blogs, online newspapers, computational algorithms, rss feeds, Facebook, and Google help us turn all of those terrabytes of data into something more useful and particular, that is, something that can be remade and repurposed by an embodied human person. These now ubiquitous technologies help us filter the essential from the excess and search for the needle in the haystack, and in so doing they have become central mediums for our experience of the world.
In this sense, technology is neither an abstract flood of data nor a simple machine-like appendage subordinate to human intentions, but instead the very manner in which humans engage the world. To celebrate the Web, or any other technology, as inherently edifying or stultifying is to ignore its more human scale: our individual access to this imagined expanse of pure information is made possible by technologies that are constructed, designed, and constantly tweaked by human decisions and experiences. These technologies do not exist independently of the human persons who design and use them. Likewise, to suggest that Google is making us stupid is to ignore the historical fact that over time technologies have had an effect on how we think, but in ways that are much more complex and not at all reducible to simple statements like “Google is making us stupid.”
Think of it this way: the Web in its entirety—just like those terrabytes of information that we imagine weighing down upon us—is inaccessible to the ill-equipped person. Digital technologies make the Web accessible by making it seem much smaller and more manageable than we imagine it to be. The Web does not exist. In this sense, the history of information overload is instructive less for what it teaches us about the quantity of information than what it teaches us about how the technologies that we design to engage the world come in turn to shape us. The specific technologies developed to manage information can give us insight into how we organize, produce, and distribute knowledge—that is, the history of information overload is a history of how we know what we know. It is not only the history of data, books, and the tools used to cope with them. It is also a history of ourselves and of the environment within which we make and in turn are made by technologies.
In the following sections, I put our information age in historical context in an effort to demonstrate that technology’s impact on the human is both precedented and constitutive of new forms of life, new norms, and new cultures. The concluding sections focus on Google in particular and consider how it is impacting our very notion of what it is to be human in the digital age. Carr and other critics of the ways we have come to interact with our digital technologies have good reason to be concerned, but, as I hope to show, for rather different reasons than they might think. The core issue concerns not particular modes of accommodating new technologies—nifty advice on dealing with email or limiting screen time—but our very conception of the relationship between the human and technology.
