When I first read Nicholas Carr's famous article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, I expected to disagree with it almost immediately. My professional and personal life exists online, I teach with technology, and I'm finishing a graduate degree that has relied heavily on digital learning environments. I habitually use YouTube and Reddit as sources of information. If Carr was right, then I should probably be concerned.
Instead, my reaction was more complicated. The argument that resonated most with me wasn't that the internet is making us less intelligent. It was the idea that the internet changes how we interact with information. Reading Carr alongside this week's materials made me reflect on a habit I've developed over the years: I constantly collect information. I have the New York Times Cooking App saved, and it has dozens of recipes I'll probably never cook. Reddit posts about DIY projects I've saved for "later." Browser bookmarks and folders where I tried to organize them all, which haven't been revisited in years. YouTube videos are waiting patiently in playlists. Even as I write this post, I know I have folders of PDFs, lesson ideas, unfinished worksheets, and graphics on Canva, plus a bunch more professional resources on my Google Drive that seemed incredibly important when I saved them. If physical hoarding is the accumulation of objects, then I may be guilty of a form of virtual hoarding.
One of the readings on Networked Knowledge Activities describes collecting as one of the most common actions people perform online. We save resources because we think they might be useful later. The reading provides an example of a runner who bookmarks dozens of marathon-training websites, only to realize later that she has accumulated far more information than she can effectively use. Her solution is to begin organizing, evaluating, and annotating those resources for herself and others. In other words, she moves from collecting to curating.
I often convince myself that saving information is productive. It feels productive, anyway. Reddit may be the most dangerous place where this exists, a lot of things that catch my eye, but no motivation to subsequently organize them and integrate them into a scaffolded project in real time. This is where I think Carr's argument still matters. Not because the internet is making us stupid, but because it has made collecting information almost effortless. Every platform encourages us to save one more thing. One more recipe. One more article. One more tutorial. One more hobby to explore someday.
At the same time, I think I'm still more optimistic than most (and Carr) about our relationship with the internet and tech in general. The internet has also introduced me to communities, hobbies, and opportunities that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. Through networked learning spaces, I've learned about instructional design, wine studies, gardening, bread making, indie video games, restaurants, and countless other interests. The issue isn't the abundance of information; it's what to do with it after I find it. Should I organize everything diligently and nitpick what is on my home screen and in my main Chrome browser to ensure there's no cognitive overload? Or do I leave the digital trails of cool posts I saved months ago, just in case I stumble on them again and it reignites something in me?
Well said. I think you defined the substance of the problem. I feel the same way. Every once in a while, when I see how many creators I follow on Instagram or elsewhere, I tend to feel silly and delete at least a third of them. I do not check their posts anyway. The same situation happens with my laptop. Sometimes I find old files, lesson ideas, or other ideas that I had to save only to keep them somewhere in the cloud. My perspective is that when I am more intentional and actually care enough to make at least a three-sentence note about the resource - that is when it matters.
ReplyDeleteSo, funnily enough, I almost made a joke similar to yours on my blog about all the recipes I have saved that I will probably never cook. I go through this cycle often, not realizing that I was experiencing overload. Like the runner, I save and bookmark posts, but in the end, I usually just close them all out and start over because I am overwhelmed.
ReplyDelete