The Stampede To Concentration
I guess I am unsurprised by the conservative, anti-Internet tides once again rising, in the form of recent commentary from Mick Carr and this recent Businesspundit piece:
[from Businesspundit: Is Concentration the New Competitive Advantage?]
[…] will the successful companies (and employees) of the future be the ones that can do the hard things? Will concentration be a major source of competitive advantage in the coming years? When everyone is focusing on strategy, leadership, and technology as their sources of competitive advantage, will you be able to win by building a workforce that can execute because they can block out the mass of digital distraction and get things done? If thinking is the primary skill of knowledge workers, will the depth of your thinking determine your success? And if so, is it better to spend your time reading financial statements (for example) than scanning Digg for the latest Web2.0 app? I have cut back on blog reading the last 6 months, trying to search for quality over quantity. I’ve changed most of my RSS subscriptions to not display full posts anymore. That way, if I want to read something all the way through, I have to click to the site, which means I am much more discerning about the content I consume.
Nick Carr is even more dismissive:
[from A beuatiful mindfulness]
You can’t have too much information. Or can you? Writing in the Guardian, Andrew Orlowski examines the “glut of hazy information, the consequences of which we have barely begun to explore, that the internet has made endlessly available.” He wonders whether the “aggregation of [online] information,” which some see as “synonymous with wisdom,” isn’t actually eroding our ability to think critically. He quotes Will Davies, of the Institute of Public Policy Research, who observes that
we can endlessly delay having to interpret and judge things by stacking more and more bits of data in front of us … That data is a comfort blanket in a way - we all do this. People are becoming addicted to getting more information all the time. You can see it when they get out their BlackBerrys as soon as they’ve stepped off a plane.
Like me, you’ve probably sensed the same thing, in yourself and in others - the way the constant collection of information becomes an easy substitute for trying to achieve any kind of true understanding. It seems a form of laziness as much as anything else, a laziness that the internet both encourages and justifies. The web is “a hall of mirrors” that provides the illusion of thinking, Michael Gorman, the president of the American Library Association, tells Orlowski.
So what I am doing, right now, is not thinking, I guess. It is an illusion of thinking, a hall or mirrors, where — because the information is reaching my eyeballs on a computer monitor instead from a printed page — I am demonstrating my laziness, and unwillingness to think critically.
Pardon me, but that’s pure and unadulterated bullshit.
This is another go at anti-web psychobabble. Might as well suggest throwing away books, too, and go back to pre-literate memorization of the epics in Homeric Greek. This is like saying Hip Hop or Rock&Roll is not “real” music, because it wasn’t written by some dead 19th Century European.
Thinking is thinking. Some thinking produces high quality, creative, and useful results — in the form of writing, plans, recommendations, insight — and other thinking is garbage.
The notion that the Web is more likely to lead to second rate thinking is just stupid. It’s like saying that those reading hard cover books are more likely to be wise than those reading paperbacks, or that longer poems are better than short ones. It’s simply a subtle form of prejudice. “Yes, all that writing on the Web is well and good, but it’s not real writing, you know. If they could really write well, stuff that can really change the world, they’d put it in a book, not is a series of posts on a silly little blog.”
I don’t dispute that the explosion of writing on the Web makes it hard to find things worth reading, but the same is true of the printing press. And, oh, that was instrumental in the birth of the Renaissance, remember?
This “get a horse”, “golden age of humanity is behind us”, anti-Web rhetoric even manages to persuade normally sensible people, like Rob Hyndman.
I will concede that being beleaguered by jangling devices, like blackberries, can disrupt your thinking process, but the Web isn’t a gizmo strapped to your hip. You don’t have to read the web through an RSS reader — which can be an assembly line process, and one that I don’t much enjoy — but the native value of what is on the web is not less by being embedded in blogs. It’s not toxic.
