The Epitaph of the Human Race: tl;dr?

Maybe the label tl;dr is an example of what Hegel meant when he wrote “The owl of minerva flies only at dusk” - knowledge of what is taking place in history only becomes visible when events or trends have already finished. Tl;dr. Ironically, mass literacy has been achieved at the very point at which reading is becoming obsolete.
 

Tl;dr. It is not an apology. It is not an explanation. I don't think it's a boast, either. I think it is writing on a gravestone. Tl;dr is the epitaph of curiosity and patience, of determination and concentration. The letters have been chiseled into the stone by google.
 

None of this is new. In 2008, Nicholas Carr, described how google was making us stupid. He described how reading is becoming more and more difficult because of how google has changed our brains. Google gives us so many shortcuts around the effort involved in opening a book and keeping it open while we give it our undivided attention and this has a direct effect on thinking:
 

“Deep reading.....is indistinguishable from deep thinking....as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”
 

None of it is new but it is accelerating.
 

In 2011 researchers showed how the work of social 'transactive memory' was increasingly being done by google: participants in the research experiments performed badly on memory tests when they believed that the facts in question would be stored for them anyway on computers; participants performed better when they believed that the information would not be stored for retrieval.

Why bother reading? Why bother remembering? If google knows we don't have to know.

I'm criticising google in this way because I believe it is leaching away layers upon layers of what it is to be a person; what it is to be in a society.

If memory is outsourced then personal identity through time is compromised.

If reading becomes a flitting and flighty reflex, then thinking will be replaced by a kind of intellectual Tourette's that can't focus for long enough for understanding to emerge.

Fifty years from now will the kind of literacy needed to read a novel or a poem of any length or substance have completely disappeared?
 

What difference will it make if, as seems likely, by the year 2055 google translate will have taken away the necessity of learning other languages?
 

How will people be able to perform tasks of any complexity – in science, engineering, art, parenting – if human intellect, memory, imagination have been deprived of opportunities to hone themselves?

If I sound like a reactionary or a Luddite then so be it. There have been many advances in the ways human beings communicate. There were similar reactions against the invention of writing (what is Derrida's notion of 'phonocentrism' if it is not a vestige and revival of this counter – revolution?), printing, the telephone, the radio and the TV but google is very different.

 

It seeks to match, exceed and replace a range of human faculties that are so comprehensive and fundamental to what it means to be a human being and to live a decent life with others: memory, curiosity, determination, intelligence, imagination, patience, failure. Without these things what will remain of people and their societies?
 

Tl;dr? Switch off google before it's too l....