Sounding the Alarm

What I come away with most of all from Nicholas Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"* is a conundrum that has much more to do with the world of publishing than it does with the article's contents:

A) I would probably be much more inclined toward the points Carr makes if he hadn't been so direly sensationalistic about making them. But,
B) If the article hadn't been so utterly sensationalistic I probably never would have heard of it, let alone read it.

The purported subject of the article is the impact of a newly pervasive technology on the way people think. Carr acknowledges that his knowledge of the subject is basically anecdotal since there aren't many published research articles in the subject yet. But he has no problem with relying on those anecdotes as the basis of his article, however hyperbolic they may be.

Take, for instance, the case of blogger Bruce Friedman who insists that due to his frequent Internet use he has "almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article" which is especially sad because he "can't read War and Peace anymore." I guess we're supposed to generalize from Friedman's experiences and agree that, yes indeed, these are dark times for the written word. I mean, this is embarrassing because now I have to admit that I received a copy of the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace last Christmas and I also petered out after a hundred pages. But I don't blame the Internet for this failure, it's strictly a matter between me and Tolstoy. In fact, I'm not sure I could have made it even as far as I did were it not for Wikipedia and the ability to quickly look up the bits of Napoleonic War trivia dished out generously on each dense page of that heavy, heavy tome. But seriously, was there ever a point in history when the ability to read War and Peace constituted a reasonable standard by which to measure the attention span of the average reader? I have no doubt that Friedman's having trouble getting back into serious novels after being away from them for awhile. But it's a false dichotomy that Carr sets up-- that you can accustom your brain either to novels or to the Internet, but certainly not both.

Carr slips into this fallacy throughout the piece, in the process constructing a good-old-days revisionist imperative of what it was like to read from books. Books are better because:

"The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds."

But isn't this confusing the format with the content? I mean, would just any old sequence of printed pages do? Doesn't it matter what's printed on those pages? How about the phone book, wouldn't it meet this criteria?

And then there's: "In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas."

Since when is book-reading necessarily an act which is sustained, undistracted or contemplative? If I could counter with another of my own anecdotes (since this is the level of discourse established by the article), I remember plenty of times in college that I'd be reading something unengaging. On a deadline. In a cafe. While the counter staff were blasting David Bowie. So just what is it about book-reading that transforms one into a bodhisattva while reading on the Internet necessarily makes one a scattershot wreck?

*Carr, Nicholas, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains". Atlantic: July/August 2008, (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google).