Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon

IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) - Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon: As historian Ann Blair has recently demonstrated, our contemporary worries about information overload resonate with historical complaints about “too many books.” Historical analogues afford us insight not only into the history of particular anxieties, but also into the ways humans have always been impacted by their own technologies. These complaints have their biblical antecedents: Ecclesiastes 12:12, “Of making books there is no end”; their classical ones: Seneca, “the abundance of books is a distraction”8; and their early modern ones: Leibniz, the “horrible mass of books keeps growing.”9 After the invention of the printing press around 1450 and the attendant drop in book prices, according to some estimates by as much as 80 percent, these complaints took on new meaning.

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