THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: VOL. 14, NO. 1 (SPRING 2012)
Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart
Chad Wellmon
"All of these devices and technologies provided shortcuts and methods for filtering and searching the mass of printed or scribal texts. They were technologies for managing two perennially precious resources: money (books and manuscripts were expensive) and time (it takes a lot of time to read every word).
While many overwhelmed readers welcomed these techniques and technologies, some, especially by the late eighteenth century, began to complain that they led to a derivative, second-hand form of knowledge. One of Kant’s students and a key figure of the German Enlightenment, J. G. Herder, mocked the French for their attempts to deal with such a proliferation of print through encyclopedias:
Now encyclopedias are being made, even Diderot and D’Alembert have lowered themselves to this. And that book that is a triumph for the French is for us the first sign of their decline. They have nothing to write and, thus, produce Abregés, vocabularies, esprits, encyclopedias—the original works fall away.18
Echoing contemporary concerns about how our reliance on Google and Wikipedia might lead to superficial forms of knowledge, Herder worried that these technologies reduced knowledge to discrete units of information. Journals reduced entire books to a paragraph or blurb; encyclopedias aggregated huge swaths of information into a deceptively simple form; compilations separated readers from the original texts."
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