The Internet Destroyed My Mind.

I'm an unabashed internet fan and internet booster, but I do think there's a lot to the concern Nicholas Carr voices in our current issue. Certainly I share this experience:

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"

All things considered, I think digital media is unquestionably a boon, but this is an issue. I should say, though, that since my dad bought be a Kindle for my birthday, I've been going back to reading books more. Somehow, taking the book and replicating some of the computer user experience has re-engaged me. And in an odd sense, the fact that it's hard to flip through a Kindle book has also been useful in this regard -- I'm going through Brothers Karamazov one page after another in an patient, orderly manner that I wouldn't have thought possible three months ago.

Comments

While I think that there is something to the idea that we get a kind of cognitive style over time in foraging and grazing on the web, i am willing to bet that the factor that accounts for the most variance in reading behavior change is simply competition. That is, there are more avenues for entertainment/information than before. As the number of options increase, the time allocated to one specific behavior/entertainment is likely to decrease. There will be individual variations but overall, I'll bet that this accounts for the bulk of the effect.

On the other hand, it is interesting that when reading something like Jane Austen, a reference to the Battle of Trafalgar sends me to Wikipedia. One hour later, i haven't actually read any further in Austen, but I've filled in a gap that makes subsequent reading a bit deeper than it would have been otherwise. This of course, is entirely anecdotal so I'll stick to my original claim that its mostly an issue of increased choice, rather than style change.

Posted by glockenspieler | June 13, 2008 11:30 AM

It's interesting that you mentioned your experience with the Kindle. I got one several weeks back, and have been reading more than I have in years. I seem to read faster as well - there is something about the familiarity of the process that not only makes me more apt to use it, but more adept at using it as well. Plus, free access to out of copyright stuff has led me to read classics I've long meant to read.

Posted by MP | June 13, 2008 11:31 AM

This may be a good post, but I zoned out about halfway through the long blockquote. Any chance you can make your posts shorter, Matthew? I can't get through these lengthy posts.

Posted by Al | June 13, 2008 11:33 AM

Well, I never thought I would ever be able to crack Ulysses, but thanks to the Internet, at least I know what Plump Buck Mulligan did and where he came from just from a one minute search on the Web.

Internet just provides more choice, as any other technology, so you (in terms of reading) do the things that you really want to do rather than what you think other would like you to do.

Posted by gregor | June 13, 2008 11:37 AM

In my experience, the vast majority of people who work in media and journalism generally possessed extremely short attention spans (and had serious trouble focusing on long pieces of writing) long before the Internet appeared. Really.

If Carr wants to blame it on the Internet, fine, but it's like hearing a drug addict attribute his increased use to the fact that his new dealer is more conveniently located.

Posted by James Gary | June 13, 2008 11:40 AM

Oh, so true. I can barely get through Glenn Greenwald's posts, much less actual books. And I was the kind of kid who would bring a two-foot stack of books on a two week vacation and have to re-up at the local bookstore after four days.

Posted by alli | June 13, 2008 11:41 AM

Actually, reading long works such as novels is, in the history of reading, the anomalous practice. It's not until long plot-driven texts become popular in the 18th century that the notion of reading a book cover-to-cover became the standard for reading.

Even the earliest books have indices, footnotes, marginal notes, chapters, commentaries, chapter summaries, illustration etc--all are designed for piecemeal readers who use books to obtain certain kinds of information, or who only want to read certain sections. (Think about the Bible, which is a good model for outlining a history of reading practices--no one's ever read it cover-to-cover, and almost every Bible ever published is paratextually dense--verse, chapter, line &c).

So no, the internets aren't harming reading skills.

Posted by theflix | June 13, 2008 11:43 AM

I agree with glockenspieler; for me, at least, it's a matter of competition. I've always spent a great deal of time reading, and these days I spend less time reading books because there's so much of interest to read on the Web. But I still do read quite a few books, and I'd feel deprived if my only reading material was on the Web.

And I certainly have not experienced any decline in my ability to focus on long-form material, either Web- or paper-based. Maybe some of this is a function of age: I'm 66, have been reading books all my life, and only in the past 10 years has the Web's mostly short-form material posed any competition. Reading in depth is too strong a habit for me by this time to be threatened by indulgence in short-form reading.

Posted by Swift Loris | June 13, 2008 11:45 AM

I can barely get through Glenn Greenwald's posts

Yeah, well, I don't think anyone else can either. One quaint artifact of the pre-blog era was a now-obsolete skill known as "editing."

Posted by James Gary | June 13, 2008 11:47 AM

In the last few years I've definitely lost a lot of patience with long prose. I continually find myself saying "get to the damn point!"

I'm not certain this is a bad thing. I started Crime and Punishment, and discovered that Dostoyevsky is unfortunately wordy, but not (yet) pointlessly so.

For good or ill, the blogosphere has trained readers to be ruthless with authors. Lazy prose is now an unforgivable sin.

Posted by Justin JJ | June 13, 2008 11:50 AM

How interesting Matt. After reading Mr. Carr's article and seeing a number of eerie similarities to my current mental situation, I decided, as a challenge, to read The Brothers Karamzov just to see if I could get through it after years of "Top 10 MOST AWESOME xyz!" blog posts that unfortunately take up too much of my reading leisure time. It's been a mixed bag so far. Not the book, which is a classic, but my ability to concentrate and move from page to page and digest the information.

Posted by Willie | June 13, 2008 11:55 AM

Has anyone else noticed that your brain seems to know that it doesn't need to remember as much. It just has to be able to remember enough to be able to google something.

Another example would be GPS. I travel for work so before GPS I would print out directions from the airport to the hotel from maps.com. After one trip I would be able to find my way without direction. Now, with GPS I can be at a site a fourth or fifth time and I still need the GPS.

My brains seems to have figured out that some information - directions, phone numbers, obscure linux commands - just don't have to be stored any more.

Posted by jmo | June 13, 2008 11:56 AM

As a dare to myself I'm blogging my journey through the Daily Reading Guide of my great-grandfather's Harvard Classics. Some days I do the reading online (it's all on Bartleby; part of the marketing genius of the Harvard Classics was that it was all p.d.), some days I read from the actual volume. The book is much better, more immersive, for the denser texts, but it's also much more initially depressing on a day when I don't feel like Pascal (e.g.)

Posted by Delicious Pundit | June 13, 2008 12:04 PM

Great points, Willie. It was even said that the ability to write things down destroyed our powers of memory. Google and GPS amplify this exponentially.

Memory is one thing, but surely there are neural pathways formed when we remember things, chart a course somewhere, or generally work to figure something out in our head without the aid of a single external tool.

Clearly some of these neural pathways are connected to overall critical thinking, and I worry our brains are atrophying from lack of basic exercise.

I wonder if this is only a perceivable phenomenon for those that knew life without the internet, but adopted it enthusiastically as they came of age. Late 20s and 30 somethings.

Are kids who have only known the wired world missing out on thought exercise altogether? Or does Google and the web free their minds for higher order thinking we never had the cycles to reach?

I wait for it to unfold.

Posted by comatose | June 13, 2008 12:13 PM

Great points, Willie. It was even said that the ability to write things down destroyed our powers of memory. Google and GPS amplify this exponentially.

Memory is one thing, but surely there are neural pathways formed when we remember things, chart a course somewhere, or generally work to figure something out in our head without the aid of a single external tool.

Clearly some of these neural pathways are connected to overall critical thinking, and I worry our brains are atrophying from lack of basic exercise.

I wonder if this is only a perceivable phenomenon for those that knew life without the internet, but adopted it enthusiastically as they came of age. Late 20s and 30 somethings.

Are kids who have only known the wired world missing out on thought exercise altogether? Or does Google and the web free their minds for higher order thinking we never had the cycles to reach?

I wait for it to unfold.

Posted by comatose | June 13, 2008 12:15 PM

Great points, Willie. It was even said that the ability to write things down destroyed our powers of memory. Google and GPS amplify this exponentially.

Memory is one thing, but surely there are neural pathways formed when we remember things, chart a course somewhere, or generally work to figure something out in our head without the aid of a single external tool.

Clearly some of these neural pathways are connected to overall critical thinking, and I worry our brains are atrophying from lack of basic exercise.

I wonder if this is only a perceivable phenomenon for those that knew life without the internet, but adopted it enthusiastically as they came of age. Late 20s and 30 somethings.

Are kids who have only known the wired world missing out on thought exercise altogether? Or does Google and the web free their minds for higher order thinking we never had the cycles to reach?

I wait for it to unfold.

Posted by comatose | June 13, 2008 12:22 PM

Jmo at 11:56--this is one of the most exciting and alarming aspects of the rise of the internet: the idea that our networked PCs (and cell phones, PDAs, your GPS device, etc.) are becoming true extensions of our own minds.

This isn't a new phenomenon: printed reference works have been serving as external, communal mini-brains for a long time in certain fields, and recently we've seen the pocket calculator obsolete the need to have confident faculties in basic math operations.

But sites like Google and Wikipedia are now doing that job at a hugely detailed level. If I'm talking on AIM to a friend, and she drops the name of some philosopher or author whom I've never heard of, in a very real sense I actually do "know" who that person is, I just have to go through a slightly more difficult process to "remember." Instead of thinking for a second and mentally recalling that he was a post-structuralist or wrote some influential work on the Sino-Russian War, I type his name into Wikipedia and scan his article and learn what he did that way. I also, incidentally, know his birth and death dates, something about his family life, and most of the important people he influenced. Before, we were accustomed to having to remember those kinds of details based on learning about the person through a book, but now there's no need to keep anything in our heads: the information is stored externally, waiting to be instantly accessed. The capabilities of books were similar, but differed in their accessibility--you can't ctrl+f in a book, and you can't keep a physical library on your desk. Now, however, if someone with a computer knows something, you can know it too, and in not a great deal more time than would have been consumed by remembering it mentally.

This has rather fascinating implications when one considers that our new brains, while highly adept, can be disabled literally with the flick of a switch.

Posted by fumphis | June 13, 2008 12:22 PM

Hmm, I haven't experienced that. Maybe it's because I haven't been on the Internet enough / for long enough?

It seems to me like there are far too many useful books for me to abandon books.

But of course, on a subject where knowing the recent twists and turns of the past few months is important, you can't beat following articles on the Internet. What if all you knew about current U.S. politics was from two or three books that were released a year ago? There would be few subjects you could discuss with people who follow American politics. The web is essential. Even people who watch TV news and read newspapers are almost lost compared to Internet-news junkies who read breaking news every day.

Posted by Swan | June 13, 2008 12:25 PM

I would definitely pick books over the Internet if I had to, but, this may just be because my interests and my amount of knowledge don't leave me requiring really recent discussion, developments and knowledge as much as Matt's and his circle's do.

If, with respect to a variety of subjects, you just are interested in basic knowledge, then you don't need all the recent discoveries. If you want to know something like economics or foreign or security policy well enough to discuss it with the people who follow it (on a level of sophistication in which they're not just unilaterally educating you), you've got to know what's up all the time.

Posted by Swan | June 13, 2008 12:32 PM

I would be interested in something like the history of religion (Joseph Campbell) or how technology and environmental conditions have historically effected mankind (Guns, Germs, and Steel), or ancient history, or political theory that applies in any day and age (Hobbes, John Rawls, Robert Nozick), or some how-to book about how to do something in my personal life or around my home better. Advances in these fields (anthropology, ancient history, etc.) come at a glacial pace, not a constant inundation. So disadvantages of the Internet are that looking at a computer screen for a long period of time can get annoying, and a person's mind doesn't seem to retain what the person reads from a computer screen quite as well as it does what it reads off a printed page.

Posted by Swan | June 13, 2008 12:40 PM

I'm a lifelong reader of books, but I too find that I read many fewer now. I would say, however, that there are different kinds of useful, nourishing reading than strictly exhaustive; that relatively small slices of information can be enormously influential, especially depending on how you might extrapolate the information. I know some of you might be thinking: 'yeah, that's the problem! People extrapolate - and poorly - false or misleading information'. Well, that is a problem, but it works the opposite way, too. It works with information which is not polemical, at least in the formal sense, and it also can work with extremely polemical material (your conclusion about the material can be the opposite of the material's POV, or immaterial to the particular argument at hand).

So much depends on how sure or faulty are your powers of extrapolation. A great example of sloppy extrapolation is the Neocon Bunch - from their politically-postmodern 'philosophy' to their actual political policies, it's just a rational-mess. It never adds up. They have skipped some steps in the reasoning chain (because they just *know* their conclusion is right).

I digress.

Any piece of information you learn and store in your memory banks (important) can be as useful as your ability to use it, to synthesize it with other information you have in your mind. And you tend to be drawn to 'news you can use'.

I don't think it's bad that we rely on machines to remember repetitive, quotidian information, so long as we use our memory for other things.

Posted by jonnybutter | June 13, 2008 12:41 PM

I can't believe nobody said this already, so I'll jump in. How typical that trust fund scumbag Matt received a shiny new Kindle for his birthday from his richy rich dad. Did you get anything else for your birthday? A new private jet? Personal ball washer?

Posted by drjimcooper | June 13, 2008 12:48 PM

I too find that I've gone from being the kid with the bestest concentration ever to having no attention span (and always needing my internet addiction break). But I don't blame the internet for my addiction to it. I blame Grad School for ruining my attention span.

Posted by DAS | June 13, 2008 12:50 PM

Since early childhood, I've always been an avid reader of books, newspapers, magazines and packaging. My interests and attention span ebbs and flows. At times the Internet feels incredibly engaging, and at others it feels like a stream of superficial yada-yada. I'm guessing most people who are readers go through this cycle. At the moment this presidential election cycle is fascinating and I can't get enough of flitting through different views on the Internet, but a few months ago I read through a stack of books and could barely stand to turn on the computer. I don't think it has any grand meaning, just that our attention shifts to different things in different ways at different times. The Internet has been added to the mix.

Posted by Sherry | June 13, 2008 12:54 PM

Simple.

Take days, or even weekends with your computer(s) turned off.

Don't use your blackberry, or iPhone, unless making simple telephone calls. Absolutely no texting.

Either unplug your television, or if you have willpower, shut it off. I had my cable TV service disconnected.

All it takes is simple willpower. The big problem is, that hardly anyone wants to unplug anymore. I've been online since the early 80's, run five websites and my own servers. But I've found it very simple to enjoy things like spending time with my girlfriend, gardening, biking, and reading.

Also, stop buying current events/political books for a couple of months. Read more about art, fiction, or humour.

Posted by Ohmmade | June 13, 2008 1:01 PM

Repent Bloggers The End (of the book) is not at hand.

I think a side effect of the internet ate my brain panic is that internet addicts are reading long long books just to prove we can.

The Brothers K has a fairly coherent plot and lots of well developed characters. I however am (for the first time) attempting to read the actual bible. OK on Kings of Israel worshipping ba'al not so hot on exactly how to sacrifice (oxen, sheep, lambs, dove) to the lord as a (burnt, peace, sin, wave, toss) offering if you are a (levite, rich layman, poor layman).

I have re-learned that the ultra hawk bloodthirsty loony religious right in Israel are absolutely right when they say they want to follow the bible (any bets on whether there are more Christians or Jews in the world who actually know what is written in the old testament). Jesus Christ Hillel ! The WORD of THE LORD makes Ariel Sharon look like Mohandas Gandhi.

Posted by Robert Waldmann | June 13, 2008 1:06 PM

For good or ill, the blogosphere has trained readers to be ruthless with authors. Lazy prose is now an unforgivable sin.

Good point. I find myself (and I'm not sure how much of it is 'since I became a mother' and how much is 'rise of the Internet') having much less patience with works than I used to. I finally took Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell back to the library because I realized I hated almost everyone in the book. But I notice when I really am enjoying something, I'll get just as attached to the book as I used to.

Posted by Persia | June 13, 2008 1:33 PM

text on the internet is like reading a short magazine article, pictures included.

A book is well, like reading a book. Different.

Posted by judson | June 13, 2008 1:34 PM

No, the internet has not destroyed your brain. You have become smarter and more intolerant of the filler and nonsense that traditionally have made up much of book-length non-fiction writing. Real ideas and arguments can and should be expressed succinctly. The internet has made this obvious. Fiction is another matter. I think people of many generations and times have sensed that somehow as they got older and busier they did not have the inclination any more to read long fiction narratives.

Posted by Psittakos | June 13, 2008 1:40 PM

Let me echo the praise for the Kindle. "Team of Rivals" sat unread on my shelf for two years. I just finished it on the Kindle in a little over 2 weeks.

Speaking of which, when is HITS available for the Kindle?

Posted by Rick Klau | June 13, 2008 1:59 PM

Those Constance Garnett translations of Dostoevsky are apparently pretty sketchy in some ways. I never did like the way they read. Apparently there are much more faithful and better-written newer translations now available (there was a New Yorker article about it a while back), but I haven't checked them out yet as I am too busy constantly refreshing Yglesias.

Posted by raskolnikov | June 13, 2008 2:02 PM

I agree with glockenspieler's point (1st comment) about the problem with reading for long periods of time having to do with competition from other forms of entertainment and other distractions. I've found that if I'm on a long plane ride with no Internet I don't have that much of a problem concentrating on a book ... although, if I have a magazine available I'm likely to read that instead. But so I'm not sure that the Internet has really ruined my ability to read for a substantial period of time, just my will to do so.

Posted by Lauren | June 13, 2008 2:58 PM

You might want to experiment with lower caffeine intake.

Less food + more exercise is interesting, too.

Posted by ferd | June 13, 2008 3:01 PM

Reading and love of reading may also have something to do with one's relative age and place in life. The few years after college and the 10 years after law school I couldn't make myself read and enjoy anything - I was too burnt out, to busy with other stuff, etc. And while I'm as addicted to the internet as anybody, in the past year, the pace of my life has slowed down some, and I'm finding that I'm reading more now than I have in years - easily and eagerly devouring 1-2+ books a week in lengthy chunks of time that would have been unthinkable before. So I don't think the skill necesarily goes away, but some sort of internal process that measures marginal utility of time or concentration energy definitely changes and ebbs and flows at different points in one's life.

Posted by Ethel-To-Tilly | June 13, 2008 3:10 PM

a few months ago i read The Brothers Karamazov on an e-reader, too, though i have the Sony e-reader (a friend got it for free and gave it to me -- who am i to complain?). i had the same experience, moving through slowly, patiently, yet attentively. it was fun keeping the text large so that i could look down at the page numbers: 352/3,339. something like that.

Posted by james Marks | June 13, 2008 7:14 PM

a few months ago i read The Brothers Karamazov on an e-reader, too, though i have the Sony e-reader (a friend got it for free and gave it to me -- who am i to complain?). i had the same experience, moving through slowly, patiently, yet attentively. it was fun keeping the text large so that i could look down at the page numbers: 352/3,339. something like that.

Posted by james | June 13, 2008 7:15 PM

Let me put a bug in your ear regarding the Brothers K.

Look for the entymyological references. Every character has a bug/arthropod associated with him or her. It's a recurrent theme.

Did a whole paper on it once and it was great fun.

And check out the Russian author Bulgakov - "We" or "Heart of the Dog" are great.

Posted by Bulgakov | June 13, 2008 7:42 PM

Matt: "The Internet Destroyed My Mind."

No, that was Harvard.

The Internet just filled up the empty space that remained.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 13, 2008 11:48 PM

I'm also finding that the internet is making me more impatient with long texts, particularly fiction. But I take some comfort in the point some of the other commentators have made, that the habit of sitting down and reading a long book straight through, is what is anamolous. Before the printing press, texts tended to be either short or used for reference, since everything had to be hand-copied. Between the printing press and the internet, you could print books, but it was useful to have one book cover as much as possible so that you didn't constantly have to pull multiple books off the shelves to "hypertext".

One thing I've found is that my appreciation of the ancient Greek and Roman classics have increased, but I really struggle with most material from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The nineteenth century, of course, was the apex of the "paid by the word" era of lengthy tomes with lots of filler. I wonder if the rise of the intenet will mean that people just stop reading Dickens. Or maybe we will rediscover the short stories and novellas of authors famous before chiefly for their novels.

With my own writing I tend to get to the point much more quickly than I did in the past, but also tend to have to catch myself more from making errors in grammer and spelling or from repeating myself. Non-standard grammer and spelling and repetition happened to also be features of pre-printing press writing.

Also, losing interest in fiction seems to be be a function of aging. This is one of those things about getting old that I wish young people were told about. I happened to read tons of "classic" fiction when I was younger, and am glad I did, but am now realizing if that for some reason I had skipped this phase in my development I never would have gotten around to it.

Posted by Ed | June 14, 2008 5:31 AM