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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

the internet + reading « Previous | |Next »
June 27, 2010

In his 2008 article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains, in The Atlantic Nicholas Carr argues that 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...Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

The internet is weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. Carr adds:
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. 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.

Carr's new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, expands on the ideas of his essay. The argument is the same. The internet is rewiring our brains. The result: a distracted, fidgety, addiction to picking up small pieces of information before clicking on to the next thing; and an inability to concentrate for very long on more substantial work.

There are echoes of older debates here about mass media---in the 1940s and 50s, comic books and rock music were going to turn the young into juvenile delinquents. In the 1960s television was going to rot our brains.They were deemed to be simplistic forms of written and visual entertainment. Now its the internet.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:46 AM |