According to his recent Atlantic article, Nicholas Carr thinks search engine juggernaut Google is trying to read your mind.
You’ve probably already seen the Google Suggest, the Google feature that predicts the text you’re typing into the search box, but Carr says it makes the search engine “like a nosy mother, intent on knowing everything her children are doing and thinking”.
As well as pointing to privacy concerns about gathering information about your every search, Carr is concerned about the impact of what he calls Googlethink. The problem is that Google is “scripting the intimate processes of intellectual inquiry and even social attachment”. He sees creativity and curiosity shoehorned into crowdsourced generalisations which he believes will make us lazier thinkers. The real problem with Google Suggest, Facebook friend finders or any number of predictive text generators is that their “choices are convenient, but they’re not our own”.