Why Learning is Harder in the Google Age.

Right when I am beginning a new series of posts on Church Leaders as “Chief Learning Officers” of Learning Communities, I read something that may stimulate more “Blogger’s Block.” Yesterday, I read an article on the internet, that I found on a comment somebody made on Facebook.  According to the article, just reading it may have made me stupider. 

In an Atlantic Monthly article from the summer of 2008 titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr argues that while the power and convenience of the internet for research (including finding year-old articles like this one) is truly a world-altering technological advance, it doesn’t come without a cost.  Technology changes the way our brains work.  After awhile of reading online, we start to read differently.  We “skim” constantly; we “bounce” regularly.  We can’t follow complex arguments as deeply.  We “decode” instead of “interpret”. We prefer the pithy over the complex, the novel over the meaningful (and this article didn’t have anything to say about “Twitter”, which even a year ago wasn’t all that big and is, at least momentarily, the next huge thing: “Oprah Tweets!”…or is it?).

While there is much to consider, discuss and ponder here, according to Carr, if we read this online (even at this blog) we likely won’t.  We may bookmark, but we rarely come back to it.  We may comment on it, but we won’t contemplate it.  Let me pull just one thought out of the article and ask you to try to stay with this one a bit…

"In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed."

In my last post, I wrote of the “blessing of blogger’s block”, of spending the better part of three months without putting up a post, because I was well, locked in the “fuzziness of contemplation.” For me, that fuzziness was exactly what I needed, that ambiguity was exactly where I needed to stay and both are what I want to encourage more leaders to embrace as they think of themselves as Chief Learning Officers of a Learning Community.

As I think about my leadership contexts, it is becoming increasingly clear that most of the challenges that we face today in the church are not matters of finding “best practices.”  (A topic I’ll take up in another post.) 

We face issues and opportunities, threats and prospects that require us to move beyond what we know, produce, and program, find quickly, skim briefly, and launch rapidly to the kinds of “adaptive shifts” that require us to think deeply, consider complexity, converse repeatedly, and implement wisely.  In other words, most of what we need to learn to face the challenges of a rapidly changing world, will require us to think slowly and learn differently. (Which, usually means, slowly.  As one person told me, “You only learn as fast as you learn.) 

And it seems that our technology is beginning to train this crucial learning skill out of us. 

Those who know me well, know that I am not a Luddite.  I truly appreciate technology. I spent an hour with my mother trying to teach her Facebook so she could keep up with her grandkids. 

But one of the ironies of even this post, is that it may be contributing the very thing that keeps us from becoming the leaders our increasingly complex world needs.

Comments

[the one at church]

I don't agree that we are getting stupider. Once we have no NEED for memorization, a mind full of facts and figures that we can just look up tend to fade. Our memory is cool in that way - it is best that we forget what we don't need to remember. I, for one, am terrible at remembering exact chapter and verse from the Bible, but I've got a pretty darn good head for Bible trivia - I have biblegateway.com to look up verses. So I've developed a bunch of paraphrases in my head rather than exact matches. It doesn't make me more stupid - it just means that a certain kind of memory and memorization is no longer needed. We don't NEED to retain information that is easily accessible.

Instead, we've learned how to type and text really quickly - our brain remembers where keys are and translates abbreviated text pretty quickly. We've learned HOW to surf the net to find the requisite information. We've developed a blogosphere that encourages a marketplace of free ideas and dialogue - in order to have a good blog, you have to be able to write fairly well, so the blogosphere may actually ENCOURAGE writing skills.

Each generation requires a new skill set. Just because dancing looks like gyrating these days rather than the jitter bug doesn't mean that you don't still sweat afterwards.

We're not getting more stupid because of technology - we just have different things that we need to learn, letting go of things we had to learn in the past.

[the one at church]

While stupider is correct, it's awkward, and more stupid is becoming the preferred way of expressing it. So the first line of the above comment should read "more stupid" to keep the post consistent.

[K.C.]

tod's back. yeah.

[A. V. Yuro II]

I skimmed this a second time, after reading it. Of course I went to read the article you refer to (as well as bit on Oprah Tweets too)
I had to laugh at your referring to a post not yet written! Just the way I see things.
The point is clear, yet I disagree. I think lazy is better term than stupid. The information is there, how much effort we CHOOSE to put into processing it is just that - a choice. If we make a habit of trying to 'get it all in' we will skim, skip, consolidate and all the other things you mention, at first by choice, then by habit. I am familiar with 'stupid habits'.
Habits are hard to break but breakable they are.
Welcome back.

[Jeff Kuhn]

I think you are bang on. While I love the internet and all it offers we are foolish to think that it is some neutral object. It shapes us, and I'm not sure that we are aware of all the implications of that fact. Thanks for your thoughts.

[Keenan]

Interesting post. This is somewhat akin to something I'm attempting to work against right now.
Being from a Media course in my school, it's easy for me to see how this is becoming more and more apparent.

Personally I get highly annoyed when people don't think about movies. Or rather, not so much not thinking about them as much as Rejecting them and THEN not thinking about them. Bah, time to destroy the internet

[daniel]

yup i read the first few lines of your article then just skimmed the rest. and yup, now i am posting on it just as you said. and yes, i am getting stupider because I have a big habit of trying to just skim or lightly read my course material instead of really immersing myself into the text.

[Ryan Baltrip]

Good post. It raises some necessary questions on learning in the internet age. Does the internet change our cognitive processing? What learning techniques does it highlight, and how do they differ from previos print based learning strategies? How can church leaders help equip their members to navigate this digital, inter-connected age? Great questions. Thanks for the spark.