2008: Shaped by the Internet Odyssey

"My mind isn't going—so far as I can tell—but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages." ---Nicholas Carr

When my latest edition of the Atlantic arrived recently, bold, multi-colored print announced the cover article: "Is Google Making Us Stoopid? What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains," by Nicholas Carr. A possible piece for a blog post, I thought, but such a hackneyed notion. My son and daughter would clearly dismiss it as overreacting or not seeing the whole picture and progressive time line. I put the idea aside for more pressing topics. Then I received a group e-mail from old friend Bob N highlighting the same article. I looked at it again.

The piece is not so much another example of yesterday's education and technology railing, crying wolf, or resentfully pouting about what is new and now embraced by a successor generation--as has often been the case. Rather, the article explores what has always been true and false about these generation-to-generation progressions and what the changes mean, pluses and minuses. But after he pleads his mea culpa, and recognizes that he may also fall into that grousing last-generation role, he nonetheless stands by his concerns.

He makes the following points, among many others:

• Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that's been written about the Net, there's been little consideration of how, exactly, it's reprogramming us. The Net's intellectual ethic remains obscure.

• "The media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains."

• Univerity College London study report: It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

• The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition.

• Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"

• In Google's world, the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive...The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

• The Net's influence doesn't end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people's minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience's new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts...

• As we are drained of our "inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance," Foreman concluded, we risk turning into "'pancake people'—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."

• Yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism [, but...]

• In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

And as I find myself further and further emersed in the internet machinery, technology and methodology, I sense some of this happening to me, too.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google