Nicholas Carr's "What the Internet is doing to our brains" article

[eub]

Nicholas Carr (he wrote Does IT Matter) has an article in the Atlantic subtitled "What the Internet is doing to our brains". (It's titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", but it's really nothing to do with that.) I don't find it too compelling as an argument, but it's an interesting article to write a follow-on to.

mamagotcha posted about it, and I commented there:

My first reaction is a dismissive "so maybe you've stopped reading books, so what does that tell us." But that's not entirely fair. It's certainly plausible that Internet use substitutes for reading books, and I think I'd agree that it slants towards a different cognitive style. So let's keep reading.

Eh, this section about Google is purely tendentious. "What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind" -- piffle. Google has next to no expertise in that direction; Carr would do better to tilt at David Allen.

Ah, he did mention the Phaedrus bit on the evils of the invention of writing -- I was reminded of that. I think, like tahnan, that saying "I may be wrong" doesn't make Carr look any less likely to be wrong. He has an interesting point, thought, that critics of new media can be absolutely right as far as they go, about what the new medium does poorly, but still miss the real effect, of what is new in it.

So then, what is Carr missing? I think perhaps two things:

Social reading leads to active reading. To move beyond passive absorption of material might be the biggest single step in the education of a reader. We need it in order to have any thoughtful response to the work, to bring it into our mental lives, to think critically -- all of which Carr is saying online reading disfavors. But maybe it's the opposite. Online reading is reading of a text that you are accustomed to wiki-edit, or comment on, or post a reply on your blog with a link. And this is characteristic of online text, isn't it, that it's about or because of other online text? Too directly and too easily about and because of, you might argue, pointing at kneejerk responses and thoughtless flamewars. But 90% of everything is crap, and maybe the crap ratio does even go up as responsive reading broadens from educated essayists to everybody -- but we get more of it, and more in total that's valuable.

Breadth has power. Carr refers to a study suggesting that online we read "horizontally" instead of vertically, snippets from multiple sources rather than the entirety of a single source. And then a non sequitur: he goes on to worry we're "merely decoding", losing the ability to read deeply and to interpret. But what do we suppose these readers of horizontal texts are doing? Aren't they synthesizing their multiple sources?

Seeing and synthesizing relevant sections of multiple sources is a powerful thing. You can get a sketch of what is agreed on and what is not, and what the opinions are. The breadth of what's out there in the world can be truly eye-opening. I claim there is nothing wrong with a horizontal text as such -- a search result, or a purposeful crawl of hyperlinked documents. Now, you can enumerate all the things wrong with our current horizontal texts -- you can miss finding whole areas, our tools have no understanding of the material, all of the books in the world are left out -- but if you want to look at where the new medium leads, squinting past the flaws is the best bet.

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

There is information I have access to on the internet that, without it, I wouldn't have as readily available. I learn MUCH more about other people, information about other cultures, anti-racism, health stuff, biology, etc than I would seek (or did seek in the past) without the internet.

Also, I pass things on to others more readily/casually.

I think intellectuals of my dad's generation probably did get a deeper knowledge of fewer things than we do, and I think (as you're saying) it's a different style, not a better or worse one. We have a broader net to our knowledge, and in many ways it's shallower; we also have a broader world we interact with.

[eub.livejournal.com]

A hedgehog -> fox shift? I could buy that.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Shallowly and personally:

I have stopped reading books. I have stopped reading deeply. But I never did these things with much enthusiasm to begin with, unless prompted by necessity. (That might be why I majored in Humanities -- there's real satisfaction in the exercise, but I need to be prodded.) I don't think I'm unusual in this regard. I think the people who are inclined to read deeply, and to follow another person's deeper lines of thought, probably still do so. And the rest of us are simply more empowered to assemble snippets to suit our prejudices.

I wonder if we're less likely to respect legitimate expertise. I wonder whether and how that matters.

[eub.livejournal.com]

The ease with which we can flatter our prejudices bothers me. It's independent of medium, too, now -- easy to buy a thousand books that say whatever you'll agree with.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i do read fewer books than i used to. but i blame college for that. ;) and i spend as much time if not more *reading*; it's just fewer novels and more livejournal.

and i agree with marzipan_pig; i now have a broader (if shallower) base of knowledge than i would without the net.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I wonder what shifts on that depth-breadth axis people have seen around them in the past. Have there been times where we could not be said to be going away from depth towards breadth? Fall of Roman civilization in Europe? Maybe it's the trend of civilization.

Though, interesting -- I'd call agriculturalists narrower and deeper than hunter/gatherers.

[via-lens.livejournal.com]

My life is not much given to long periods of deep reading and reflection, by nature of how interrupt-driven it is. But I think that I learn more, from more sources, by consuming small snippets of information during the time that is available to me. I also don't watch movies much anymore because of how hard it is to get 2 hours to myself.

But there's another side to it, which is that interrupts beget interrupts. I think part of my lack of movie-watching has to do with the fact that I also lack the ability to concentrate deeply for that long a period of time on just one thing. I still enjoy movies in the theater where the entire environment lends itself to watching the film.

Back to reading, though: I don't read as many books, but books have always been largely a pleasure and form of entertainment for me. Like beaq, I majored in Humanities and read thousands of pages a month during that time of philosophy and primary source history and whatnot. I think that the classical education prepared me to examine and synthesize my smaller, lighter sources better now. This is something I should remember as I help shepherd my own kid through his education.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Maybe we could use environments like movie theaters, but for books. Hm, library reading rooms. (I go to the library much less often than I used to before I started buying books.)

About the classical education: it does concern me that people have to put together a coherent structure out of fragments when they may possibly not have spent as much time with old-fashioned pre-assembled coherent structures.