by Roger D’Aprix

The July-August issue of The Atlantic features a cover story entitled “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” by writer Nicholas Carr. His thesis essentially is that our online proclivities are short-circuiting our powers of concentration and affecting our ability to focus. In his words, “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing…I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading, immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. ..Now my concentration 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.

Carr blames the fact that he’s been spending too much time online although he calls the web ‘a godsend to me as a writer.’ He adds, however, that the blessing of ready online information comes with a price. He observes that the net seems to be robbing him of his powers of concentration and contemplation. Again in his words, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

That he is not imagining his loss is evidenced in the work of developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf from Tufts University. She’s an expert in the neurology of reading who claims we are ‘not only what we read but also how we read.’ In her work she’s discovered that when we read online we tend to be ‘mere decoders of information,’ a tendency that limits our ability to ‘interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction (italics mine.)

Carr ends by quoting the words of the playwright Richard Foreman in a view that resonates totally with me. He says, “I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my) ideal was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. I (now) see within us all…the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’

If the end result of our powerful, and now essential, technological tools is the loss of the ability to think beyond the mere information given, we are in serious trouble as a democratic society.