IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) - Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon

The Hedgehog Review: Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 14.1 (Spring 2012). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details. Last year The Economist published a special report not on the global financial crisis or the polarization of the American electorate, but on the era of big data. Some see this as information abundance, others as information overload. The more pressing, if more complex, task of our digital age, then, lies not in figuring out what comes after the yottabyte, but in cultivating contact with an increasingly technologically formed world.2 In order to understand how our lives are already deeply formed by technology, we need to consider information not only in the abstract terms of terrabytes and zettabytes, but also in more cultural terms. Two Narratives Too Many Books Enlightenment Reading Technologies Endnotes Related: