Everyone seems to be talking about Nicholas Carr's recent article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (see here, here, and here) and I'm not one to buck the trend, although there is one aspect of Carr's piece that I find a bit frustrating. It is way too long! I would probably fare better with the print version but for me the online version is damn-near unreadable after a few paragraphs. Admittedly, as someone who writes super-long posts in a relatively small font (I'm working on it), I recognize the plank in my own eye, but I think there may be more involved here than Google scrambling our brains.
I definitely don't read as many posts by other bloggers as I would like, mostly because reading text on computer screens hurts my eyes after just a few minutes. While I'm writing it isn't so bad, the movement of the cursor and characters giving me something to concentrate on, but it is extremely difficult for me to read big hunks of text splayed all over the web. I skim because it is too painful to do otherwise. When I read a book, by contrast, I can concentrate much better and often am able to restrain myself from skimming (unless the prose is dizzingly dull), but I have another problem altogether when I'm reading books; the urge to "multitask."
Every afternoon I used to walk to the benches two blocks from my apartment with a Terry Pratchett novel and read for a few hours, enjoying the sunset as I devoured the hilarious books. I would specifically set aside time for reading, even reading aloud to my wife, but sometime during the past year I came under the impression that I could multitask. I guess I had become so focused a reader that I could generally block out conversations and background noise that I assumed I could turn on a movie and read at the same time. I have only found that I end up missing most of the movie and the text doesn't really sink in, and I constantly have to backtrack a line or two to pick up where I left off.
At the risk of running long (again) I think it best to sum things up. If you are really a web-head and do most of your reading on the computer your reading style is going to be changed, just as training yourself to get through whole books in the first place requires some changes. For my own part, though, I think that too many of us have been confused into thinking that we can multitask, and the pain that computer monitors cause to our eyes has made us respond to real books the same way as we do to articles on the computer, namely skimming the material rather than really becoming engrossed in the text. This can be changed, but it requires the adoption of different reading styles for different occasions, something of an acquired skill.
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Try this tip from me and my geezer eyes.
Add the two Instapaper.com buttons (free, ultra-minimalist signup required) to your browser's linkbar. When there's something worth reading, click the "Read Later" button. (Takes maybe a second on the timeclock.)
Then, at your leisure, click on the Instapaper link to find your most recently indexed article at the top. You *could* click on the big blue link to see the original, or you could click the TEXT button on the right.
The result of TEXT is just as you'd expect: A nicely-formatted galley with sensible fonts, plenty of whitespace and no distractions. Schweet!
PS, Carr is trolling for links, methinks.
Heh. The first responses I got when I told people to go read the article were complaints that it was too long. Then complaints that the blog post I wrote about it was too long. (Fortunately for me, I had a hard copy of the Atlantic in front of me, or I might never have finished it myself!)
I happen to think it's very funny that he expects people to read it when he claims to be unable to get through more than two pages. Three paragraphs is his friend's top!
I think his audience isn't going to believe him. I don't.
Jessica Palmer makes some good points, but in general, and in particular the article which started this flap, I think people are flying into a fake panic about a fake "problem".
Google doesn't make us do anything. We make ourselves or prevent ourselves doing, but a lot of this concern is over anecdotes, not over actual science.
The so-called "study" about people's habits on, for example, the British Library online, leaves a lot to be desired. They seem to have studied only the online activity and nothing offline.
In the past, all people had available for research was books, and books are and were expensive. People were likely, IMO, to only look at one or two and study those in depth, whereas now, we have access to a multitude of resources which are all essentially free (after your ISP charges) no matter how many you look at.
How do we know that instead of studying one or two references in depth, people are not studying several more lightly and getting a better overall take on a topic than they would have before?
Jessica presents rather more solid material, but even here we seem to be comparing book reading with Internet use. I'm not at all conviced we're comparing apples with apples.
Id be interested in seeing studies which examine how people spend their time in general from "back then" with now. I don't think we're close to getting an accurate picture at this point.