are you stupid or something?

just wanted to share a few excerpts of a fascinating article in The Atlantic that considers the effects our everyday internet usage and heavy reliance thereon are having on our brains, or at least our thought processes.

it's much too long for any of you internet-affected dummies to read the entire thing, so here are a few chunks i appreciated while impatiently skimming through it ;-)

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.

* * *

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University... “We are how we read.” 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.

* * *

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.

i have to admit i've noticed similar changes -- i'm sure we all have. (some of you probably couldn't even make it through those three excerpts above.) but i am also skeptical of these theories.

just think about the fact that millions of people will still sit for hours -- days, even! -- after a Harry Potter book hits the stands, reading feverishly and getting lost in the story. people do it every day, just minutes after stepping away from their computer screens.

and maybe we're not memorizing the Twilight novel, but doing that would probably dumb us down worse than the internet does. no offense...


what are your thoughts? or has the internet robbed you of them all?