The July/August edition of Atlantic Monthly has an article on whether Google and the Internet is making us stupid. Author Nicholas Carr is certainly not the first to wonder about this. I have to admit, an early paragraph in his piece felt really familiar.
"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. 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. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."
I've occasionally felt this way over the last few years and have talked about it with friends who also used to read novels by the boat loads. I was a Lit major and used to read all the time. I've been known to hoard books. Once when I was living in Baltimore, I ventured out during an ice storm with a sprained knee to go to the library and restock my reading supply. I have vivid memories of trying to maneuver down icy stairs in a full leg brace but happy because I had a backpack full of books.
Today, if I were stranded due to weather and a bum wheel, well, I'd just fire up the laptop and click from article to article. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just different, and I wonder what the overall effect will be. I don't mean to overly romanticize some past that never was, when everyone spent their days in overstuffed chairs working their way through the literary canon. But did we read differently before the Internet?
This whole idea reminds me of a picture I took of my father a couple of years ago at Christmas. He rarely reads online. His study is a place where time stands still. Whenever I step into it, I always feel like it's a world both foreign yet completely comfortable.
BARBARA A. CLAYTON from Oceanside
June 12, 2008 at 04:37 AM
Sadly, a resounding YES. In front of me right now is a letter from KPBS saying "On Air" magazine is ending because KPBS 'must evolve' with the changing times. So much for 'A Way with Words'. They have shown how much they value the written/printed page.
I'm debating whether to renew. I will definitely miss my magazine. I always looked forward to scanning the entire month of programming & reading & saving certain articles. I feel as if I have lost contact with old friends, forever.
Give me a book any day.
Maybe this is not such a bad thing after all. I'll get that much more reading done.
Matt
July 06, 2008 at 04:27 PM
I'm the same way. Books used to be fun, and now not so much. The Internet has a lot to do with it. The Internet has created a society of the casual meanderer. We're very much like people at the local fair. We'll walk by things, checking them out only long enough to absorb the meaning and then move on. Occasionally, something will grab our attention for longer and then we'll buy it. To quote the Borg, "Resistance is futile"
