“‘Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?’ So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Nicholas Carr writes for The Atlantic. “Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says, forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.'”
“I can feel it, too,” Carr writes. “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.”
“I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link,” Carr writes.
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The conventional wisdom says that using your brain helps keep it healthy. The internet certainly invites people to use their brains, which is more than one can say for tv. The thing is, a computer monitor is not the most user-friendly medium for extended reading. And we can blame tv news for the sound-bite school of journalism. We have all been trained by tv, not the internet, to get our information in concentrated doses. The internet is a suitable medium for the continuation of that trend. Personally, I still love to read… books, that is. I hate reading long articles on the computer screen. Use it or lose it, that’s what I say. And pick your poison.
@Road Warrier (NLI):
Good point. The quick cutting of visual images popularized by MTV has also made its way into tv and movies. But the thing is, the human brain is an amazing, severely under-utilized organ. It may be that the brain itself work at much higher speed than we are accustomed to. For example, some people can read an entire book in just a few minutes and retain just as much information as most people would get from reading the book at normal speed.
Then there’s the argument that a great deal of useless filler goes into alot of media. Personally, I have read many 200-page books (especially non-fiction) that could easily be condensed into a few pages of useful information. So this is a complex issue, and the times they are a-changin’.