So asks the cover story of the July/August issue of The Atlantic. Author Nicolas Carr frames the issue in a way that will resonate with many, if not most of us:
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 think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link…
[...]But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I think he makes a pretty fair point. The Web encourages and rewards a restless, fast-paced ADD-style of reading. On the plus side, hyperlinking from one information source to the next, following gut instinct (or your attraction to some bright, shiny piece of information in the form of a link that caught your eye) is an efficient way to quickly get your arms around a topic. Efficient Web readers learn to quickly qualify sources, identify bias, and drill for facts and citations through rapid iterative searches. But on the negative side, this m.o. can lead to a certain impatience for writing that takes an idea and asks you invest the time to follow a particular line of thought.
However, I find it more than a bit ironic that I am blogging about my reaction to a linear, extended argument presented in a lengthy article about how I am no longer able to process lengthy articles and follow linear, extended arguments. Just saying…