Stupid Google and the Pancake People

I came across a really good Nicholas Carr article during my post-holiday-looking-for-anything-to-avoid-work blues last week. It’s about how Google is changing the way we consume info and had a lot of blogging action already. (Thanks to Amelia for the link.)

The basic principle is that our mind is adjusting to consuming information the way the internet presents it – in short, sharp, interlinked snippets. We quickly scan small chunks of info hopping from page to page in search of that key nugget of information (‘power browsing’). Hyperlinks propel us from site to site where footnotes once suggested further reading, aggregators give a peak at info where “Introductions” once gave an overview and Yahoo Answers lets us cut through the crap altogether and grill a whole community for specific info.

Apparently all of this is obstructing our ability to read and absorb longer texts, full articles and books. The British Library, for instance, noted that people using their online journals and e-books constantly jumped from source to source rarely returning to any text they’d previously visited. They simply “skimmed” a few pages before bouncing to the next article.

Carr points out that, ironically, we may actually be reading more today than we did in the 70s (thanks to SMS messaging, e-mail and the internet) but in a totally different way. “Once we were scubadivers in a sea of words. Now we zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski”. This is even being echoed offline. Since March this year The New York Times has devoted the second and third page of every edition to abstracts of the articles featured.

Way back in the 4th century BC Plato’s character Socrates feared that the development of writing would hinder day to day general knowledge (men would “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful”). The Gutenberg printing press drew similar concern from Squarciafico (the Italian Humanist) questioning whether the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness. Should we be concerned that the net is making us stupid?

I guess it’s a simple debate of breadth vs depth – we may learn about a whole load of new stuff, just in less detail (although there are exceptions, such as Wikipedia). I mentioned this point a while ago when debating whether ‘integrated clients’ would struggle to review a variety of work from a variety of agencies across a variety of media. Would they become ‘pancake people’ (thinly spread across a broad area)?

What about a ‘pancake agency’? Is a fully integrated agency simply a jack-of-all-trades? A recent report from the University of Chicago Graduate School highlights the so-called “Dilution Effect” (Rory Sutherland touched on this the other week). Put simply, people generally want things to serve more than one purpose, but when said thing accomplishes multiple goals it becomes less associated with the achievement of a single goal. For instance, a laser-pen is great when you want to give a lecture and make notes at the same time, but would you use it just for day-to-day writing? Apparently not. Likewise the gym – it may have started as a great place to exercise but once it also becomes a place to socialise it loses an element of its status as a get fit venue.

So would Fallon, for example, lose some of its reputation for great TV ads if they started doing good DM? And could an integrated client judge it anyway?

Then again, if we were to add a little depth to a well known figure of speech we’d realise that “Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better then master of one”. Hmm…