The Atlantic on the Internet making us stupid
A couple of people have sent me the link to the cover story in the latest issue of The Atlantic, which is called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The article, written by Nicholas Carr, is a fascinating read. He comments on how the habits of browsing the Internet–skimming information and endlessly clicking on hyperlinks to follow new threads of thought–may well be altering our brains. (The title reference to Google is clever but not quite accurate; it’s really the Internet itself that is the issue, not Google.) One side effect of all this browsing and clicking may be that we are losing the capacity for sustained reading and the resulting thought patterns that can come from that level of concentration and focus.
As I said, the article is quite interesting. I urge you all to read it, but I also suggest that you look at the many contrarian views that are popping up on the Internet (surprise, surprise). For instance, take a look at this very fine Publishing 2.0 blog post by Scott Karp. He is quoted in the magazine article and thus has a somewhat personal beef to pick with Carr, but at the same time the anecdote he tells about how hard he had to work to read the article in question is quite telling. I can easily relate to Carr’s point about how difficult it is these days to focus on a long piece of writing without being distracted by a million other things–including the Internet–and I share his concern about what this means for our society. At the same time, as a book (and Web) publisher, I recognize and applaud Karp’s larger point about the need of print publishers to reorient themselves to the Web. I don’t have any deeper insight into the issue than this facile post (that would require sustained thought, which I don’t have time for at the moment!), but these are interesting topics that anyone interested in Internet publishing (and reading in general) should explore.