Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often 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…..
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
And why?
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
/me makes not to self: “Write shorter blog entries”
Did you even read this far?
Yes I did read this far
I got the same experience, more or less. Meaning: I became less tolerant for long articles and texts which have not that much added value (to use a terrible expression). I get more selective.
It is not only a consequence of blogging, I think, but of the proliferation of electronic networks.
It is part of my job to study those networks and I am also personally passionated about this phenomenon, but it is hard to monitor facebook, myspace, twitter, friendfeed, second life, pownce, the well etc. while listening and sharing on last.fm, del.icio.us and trying to write blogposts and managing some wikis.
It imposes constantly hard choices. The danger is of course that one feels constantly under pressure to do even more, it seems it is never enough.
I am glad to be able to let it all go while sailing… on Second Life.
This is horribly familiar to me too, I always put it down to age, now I wonder…
Awww…..I love the image of sailing in Second Life as the respite from the madness of our electronic world.
Now, I really need to post about my new Kindle, which although is a book reader, also ends up creating this sort of tendency to scan and skim. I wonder if it’s because the text is electronic, the reader is a certain size (blog-post length I’d call it), or whether I just like clicking the button to turn the page.
Now….a Kindle on a sail boat is about as an ideal image of which I can think.