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

[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.