Nicholas Carr’s latest cover story in the Atlantic has sure kicked up a lot of dust – and for good reason. The article is a worthy read – Carr makes some great points and he is entirely correct about one thing – we are changing.

It’s really a fascinating story – for the first time we are able to see and record the evolutionary process at work! The rapid pace of change has given us an amazing opportunity to witness the human animal undergoing a profound evolutionary leap. How we think and process information is getting a major re-write.

Yet Carr’s piece is not about that, not really. No, Carr’s piece is a cheap shot across the bow of the digerati. His argument is a thinly veiled (when veiled at all) assault on the business of the internet rather than an astute analysis of how the shift toward networked cognition might effect the ways we govern, the ways we create, the ways we report, the ways we debate and collaborate. Take this passage:

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. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

This is not only combative, but essentially wrongheaded. The basic idea and primary payoff in Google’s vision of AI (and to a large extent the internet itself) is not to upgrade the brain but to network it. Not a faster processor or bigger hard drive, but an ethernet jack. Rather than being chained to our stale and rigid individual perspectives we can take steps toward (and perhaps make a return to) a collective, tribal, social intelligence that offers the possibility to lessen the impact of xenophobic bigotry and promote an atmosphere of empathy and understanding.

Perhaps if Mr. Carr wasn’t so preoccupied with Google’s market share he might have written that story. If he wasn’t so busy thinking up pithy metaphors about ambiguity he might have realized that, in the networked mind, ambiguity is an environmental constant and that contemplation (the mind’s primary method of disambiguation) is a continuous, always on process rather than an episodic, stop and think moment.

So why is Mr. Carr so pessimistic? What is he protecting? What loss is he lamenting? It seems that he’s not ready to give up on the deeply felt, narrowly prescribed experience of reading another person’s thoughts at length. It seems that he feels that exposing yourself to a limited number of perspectives – really, truly, deeply, exposing yourself to them – will make you “smarter” than getting a wide range of ideas from countless perspectives. It seems he feels that the best way to “make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas” is to ruminate on the ideas of one other person for a long time rather than continuously contemplate constantly shifting and evolving information from diverse and conflicting points of view.

Ultimately the fallacy that Carr and folks like Maryanne Wolf promote is that this deep, slow, narrow way to process information and ideas is the only way to achieve what they call deep thinking. They can’t seem to understand or accept that the evolving human mind can “make rich mental connections” – can think deeply and continuously about a large amount of chunked, mixed, mashed, diverse and networked information. That’s the story that Nicholas Carr should have written – but I guess his deep, cemented, fixed, author induced cognitive processes just wouldn’t let him see it.