ADD - Reading in Doe Part 2

There's a wall in the magazine room with the latest issues of the more read magazines prominently displayed. One in particular caught my eye. On the cover it read, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Okay, that was a sensationalist title, but it did get my attention. The piece is actually a general commentary on the Internet. The author is not saying that easy access to a wealth of information is making us stupid, but rather he is speculating that it's altering the way we think.

"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."

He's using mostly anecdotal evidence, but what he says largely describes my own experience. He says, "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 do that too; I tend to constantly skim and scan a large variety of things, always ready to move on to the next item. My attention constantly shifts and I'm easily distracted when I'm online.

Anyway the article is pretty long and he goes on to talk about how the brain can remap itself and the all encompassing-ness of the Internet. He eventually gets to the evolution of information, like how Socrates was hating on the development of the written language, but it all worked out in the end or something. I don't really know as I only skimmed it. He should know better than to write such a long article.