New Now Know How

dihard:

From an author who understands that “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” this is a rather long (but good) article.

Somewhere in the article, Nicholas Carr writes:

Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.

True. Yet he finishes the article with:

as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

The problem here is that all interaction with the world is mediated, through computers, or through our senses. I’m quite impressively short-sighted — I have about six inches of clear vision — my sight is “artificial” by Carr’s definition. Even the sight of someone who doesn’t wear glasses is mediated because the image created by light going into the eye does not match what we “see”. It’s upside-down, for one thing. The amount of processing that your brain has to do to “see” is amazing.

Mediation of experience is not bad. There is good mediation, that makes things as clear as possible, and there is bad mediation, that obscures things by accident or by intention. But mediation is all there is.