Have we become pancake people?
This article is part of Big Squirrel’s “Small Bites” series – short, easily digestible musings from our team, designed to get you thinking.
Nicholas Carr explores how the internet is rewiring our brains to skim, scroll, and click rather than absorb and contemplate. Deep reading is now a struggle against a rewired attention span shaped by algorithms and digital convenience. Carr raises the alarm: We’re becoming pancake people – spread wide but thin.
But here’s the fun twist. This article was written about Google in 2008.
Read the original article: Google Is Making Us Stupid?
Why does this matter now?
Technology has existed since the invention of the axle. Introducing new technology has always revealed people who dream of a new future and those who yearn for the past. The printing press, the clock, the car, the Walkman– all technologies that were criticized before being widely adopted.
Are things better or worse now– or are they just changing?
What role do you want to play in this conversation? What’s the difference between the alarmist or the optimist– and what’s being missed by both parties? If you like the future we’re headed into, what does it look like to open the aperture even further? If the future from here looks troubling, what does a future look like where the positives outweigh the negatives?