Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008) - 0 views
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It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
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Bill Guinee on 18 Apr 09I have a stack of books I should be reading right now, but I am cruizing the internet instead.
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Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be 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. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
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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.
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Maybe we are learning a new mental skill and as a choice are letting go of a skill that we no longer find useful?
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What the Internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr Is Google Making Us Stupid?
