Prolog:
Nick Carr the uber-naysayer came up with a superb riff on the Internet-dominated world with a tremendously provocative “is Google Making Us Stupid?”

To Nick’s credit, it has now become quite fashionable to take a dystopian view of technology with virtually all the gurus of the tech world falling over themselves to toe Nick Carr’s line. ABC News joined the party declaring that GPS technology may make us dumb (this story made it to the top both on techmeme and digg).Vinnie Mirchandani is saying GPS could affect your manliness, ouch!

John Battelle made a feeble attempt to counter Nick. [John, you could have done better than that]. I decided to take this topic up because some crucial points have been missed so far.

GPS makes us dumb?
Let us get the easy one out first, eh! First of all, to argue that having an immaculate sense of direction is a sign of great advancement, already plays into the hands of technology. If we were still in the hunter-gatherer or even agricultural-rural life style,we hardly needed to step outside our immediate vicinity.  Due to that, a sense of direction was unimportant to survive and hence relatively useless from a evolutionary standpoint. It is only with the advent of automobiles that we started to spread out far and wide and we started to need maps etc to navigate. GPS has simply made the chore of managing directions very simple.

In other words GPS has simply took the complexity out, which was actually an artefact of urbanizing technology. Therefore, to now argue that GPS technology is making us dumb is ludicrous . To cite another example, not too long ago, oceans had to be navigated looking at the stars, so one could argue that modern ocean going technology has made us dumb. Ultimately, technology makes lives complex initially and over time technology will figure out a way to make things simpler again albeit in a different way. This is the inexorable march of technology.

Internet
The Internet, is a somewhat different animal. It has created an information explosion unparalleled in the history of humankind. The reasons for that are obvious, so we won’t get into that. Nick’s article definitely made me think about the problem a little more deeply (Ironically, that is what he is claiming we don’t do these days!). When i was reading up on the subject, i found this insightful comment on the John Battelle post.

Saurav Sahay, who posted the comment, pointed me to Herbert Simon, a brilliant cognitive psychologist who was utterly prescient in talking about the phenomenon we are seeing today.

Attention Economy

Herbert Simon said this in 1971:

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

If you read the statement above, it is pretty clear that is the exact situation we are in. Because we are bombarded with so many pieces of information, advertisements, television, games, sports there is not enough time to focus on any one thing. It is our inability to manage the explosion of information that is causing this phenomenon. If you have deep interests in Cognitive Psychology, there is also an emerging consensus about a new type of effect, that this is having on us – continuous partial attention.

A massive opportunity for technology

Technology,overall, makes lives easier and saves time for us to solve bigger problems, that are yet to be solved – like energy, sustainable development etc.

In the context of this post, taming this information explosion is probably a mammoth opportunity for technology, where the next Google could take root. The current Google doesn’t cut it yet, because it is a post-facto organizer of information and does not do that good a job of organizing the information as it is getting published (I don’t agree that Google News is good enough for this job yet).

Newspapers did a good job of this in the past when our concerns were highly localized but now with our global outlook, newspapers are passe.

Is there some hope? As the eternal optimist, i look at Techmeme.com for inspiration. Before i discovered Techmeme, i used to subscribe to around 100 A-list tech blogs to understand what is going on. I have now unsubscribed from all of them. If they write anything interesting, it appears on techmeme, anyway. You can also make the case for Digg.com and Reddit.com playing a part in bubbling up what is truly worth noting, but both Digg and Reddit lack the focus that Techmeme has and hence don’t do as effective a job.

Epilog:
What is your take on this? How do you handle the information explosion?