Last summer, Nicholas Carr threw down a gauntlet with the title of his article for The Atlantic, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?‘ In the article, Carr describes a number of traits of the contemporary internet-enabled (or perhaps addled) individual: turning to a computer rather than a book for research, skimming text more frequently, and valuing a breadth of information over depth. While these observations are correct, it is striking that Carr’s article never confronts specific technologies that might be, well, ‘making us stupid.’ In Carr’s article, the word ‘Google’ acts as a surrogate both for ‘the internet’ and for ‘Google Search,’ a conflation that is not entirely without reason. But Google (the company) is not the only agent behind the tendencies against which Carr describes. It would be in bad faith to justify this omission on the evidence that Carr could be a victim of his central revelation: ‘Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.’ It’s as if writing an article about the internet could be done with the same amount of care that an internet audience would allegedly take in reading it. In short, the article fails to actually examine what technologies exist. Before thinking about what it would mean to explore the internet like a ’scuba diver,’ we must take seriously the technologies that advance this other kind of ‘Jet Ski’ interaction. Something is happening to the way that we process information, but what?

Carr is prescient in putting scare quotes around the word ‘content,’ which is now used as a kind of metonymy in the vernacular of many, and also in the official messaging of Google for anything which can be consumed online. But ‘content’ does not have to sit in search engine indexes waiting to be found. Instead, it can be moved quickly through networks of people by highly-developed technologies. The use of these networks has created a new, granular unit of information: the item, which is best understood as part of a series, or ‘feed’ of many items. The standard for feeds online is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and every blog, every Flickr user, and every conceivable page on Craigslist has one. An RSS feed is effectively an open container into which items flow. In other words, each post on a blog corresponds to an item. Each photo that a Flickr user uploads corresponds to an item. Indeed, each new apartment listed for rent in San Francisco in the Alamo Square/NOPA area for under $1000 (or whatever search terms you enter) corresponds to an item.

At a certain point, the people who participate in these networks must filter an immense number of items, which must be evaluated and acted upon quickly. ‘Acted upon’ could mean: ignored, emailed to a friend and then ignored, read, saved to read later. This is why the internet can be a challenging medium for certain types of cultural production, like long-form essays, critical thought, or, in short, ‘quiet spaces,’ as Carr calls them. The sheer slowness of reading a long article is a major hindrance to finding a willing audience through an itemized medium, where the context of reading one thing is not a free afternoon, but 500 or more other items waiting to be evaluated. If the internet promises democratization of information, then the item is a somewhat cynical end point: it accords everything the same degree of inattention.

Technology acolytes commonly forget that wide swaths of people remain entirely unaware of their habits. For many a discussion of these ‘items’ is undoubtedly vague. Let’s take a step back to examine some prominent technologies which promote the use of the item online, in a clear and understandable way. There are three notable services at the moment: Facebook Posted Items, Tumblr, and Google Reader. These three services participate, to different degrees, in an active network of interacting with items online.

The Posted Items feature on Facebook is a simple way to share a link amongst a group of online friends, without the intrusiveness (whether real or perceived) of emailing the same group. The user can add a comment along with their Posted Item, and other Facebook users can leave their comments below it. If the user is posting a link to YouTube, the video will be automatically embedded. Facebook has such a tremendous number of users that Posted Items is a significant conduit of items; millions of links must pass through it each day. Still, Facebook recently added an important feature to Posted Items: a ’share’ link, which allows you to take a friend’s Posted Item, and add it to your own profile, as if you had posted it yourself. This is an important feature, although certainly not one of Facebook’s own invention.

It has significantly fewer users than Facebook, but Tumblr has created an impressive platform for sharing items with its ‘Reblog’ feature, a possible source of inspiration for Facebook’s item-sharing feature. Tumblr is nominally a blogging platform, but its interface is heavily geared towards ‘posting items’ video clips, images, text quotes or audio files, with or without a written comment. ‘Tumblelogs’ are available publically, but anyone who registers with the site can ‘follow’ other users. This just means that all posts by ‘followed’ users will appear on one screen, the ‘dashboard.’ The brilliance of Tumblr is that with two clicks, a user can copy any item in their dashboard directly into their own Tumblelog. This not only publishes the item online, but also to the dashboards of everyone who is following the user on Tumblr. The path any item takes as it bounces from one user’s Tumblelog to the next can be tracked through the dashboard; a popular item may be reblogged by over 100 users. This is not a huge number, but it does represent significantly more readers who will have seen the item.

But where do items go? How does anyone interact with an item? The answer is an RSS reader, which collects and displays the items from RSS feeds. An RSS reader will display the posts from all of the blogs you read, the photos your friends are uploading on Flickr, and all of those sub-$1000 apartments opening up in Alamo Square, as they are posted, without you having to do anything. Content comes to you.

Google’s RSS product, Google Reader, takes all of the elements presented so far and combines them in one package. At its most basic level, it is a standard RSS reader. However, its most important feature is the ability to ’share’ items. Just like Tumblr’s ‘reblog,’ anyone who sees an item in Google Reader can click a button, and instantly broadcast it to their other ‘friends’ using Reader. (In this case, your ‘friends’ are determined by your contacts in Gmail.) In this way, you can create a new, consumable feed of items, which themselves can be re-shared by others, and thereby transmitted to all of their contacts in Google Reader. Like Facebook Posted Items, it’s also possible to add any content directly to your shared items, not just things that already exist as items in RSS feeds. Out of the three mechanisms presented here, Google Reader is the most comprehensive: it includes the ability to turn anything on the internet into an item, to share any item among friends, and to do something with items in one place.

But perhaps you don’t want any of this. Perhaps you don’t read blogs. Why do RSS and its item-based permutations matter? Although they the current mode of transmitting information online, they could very well be rendered obsolete within a few years. But the time to fight against this style of consuming information has passed; some readers may never regain their attention span. With only a few exceptions, the content that travels the farthest through these networks is content that can be digested quickly. Lolcats, an internet phenomenon of cat pictures with joke captions, has been one of the farthest-reaching memes. A site which quickly capitalized on lolcats, icanhascheezburger.com, now employs twelve people full-time. Towards the end of his article, Carr hints that what’s at stake is nothing less than the future of Western culture, and it’s probably true that lolcats will not be held up as the zenith of the Occident’s early millennial years. But it’s a bizarre claim to make, even though technology can be used to promote certain shallow tendencies. Where is the place for carefully considered content really, slow content in this medium? Carr does not ask this question, but it seems to underlie his article.

What’s left for advocates of this content, when not choosing to ignore the internet, is to use it without playing the item game. While it does seem unlikely that a blog publishing long essays will travel far through Tumblr or Google Reader, this does not mean that carefully thought-out content and the internet shouldn’t mix. On the one hand, online activity still provides an excellent chance for people to meet and exchange ideas. In the world of photography, a number of internet-only projects, like ithoughtiwasalone, have sprung up to showcase new work and start conversations among artists. It is worth noting that these groups tend to use ’slower’ analog equipment. Another photography-related project, Words Without Pictures, is a site which posted eleven long essays by different authors over the course of 2008. The site had no RSS feed, but readers posted links to it on their blogs. Whether the essays found a thoughtful audience this way is impossible to say, but Words Without Pictures approached the internet on its own terms, and was rewarded with a moderate level of distribution through RSS-based networks. As a form, the internet is wide open, and although it is tempting to imagine that everyone online wants ‘Jet Ski’-like, itemized content, there is still a place for endeavors outside of this formula. Even online, there are quiet corners for contemplation, and indeed anyone can fashion one out for themselves. Words Without Pictures is not posting any new essays in 2009, but the ‘content’ on the site will reach a new audience in May 2009, when it is published as a book.

Dan Abbe is a former employee of Google. He lives in Tokyo, and checked Google Reader countless times while writing this article.