The Internet Maked Me Unsmart
Nicholas Carr has a fascinating article in the current issue of Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”1 In the article he discusses the fact that the Internet is changing not only the way in which we access data but also the way in which we process it. Drawing on his own experience and the research of others, Carr discusses the way that the media through from which we draw information actually rewire our brains. He laments his own transformation from someone who used to be able to delve deeply into books and process their arguments into someone who gets distracted easily when a complex argument goes on for more than a few pages.
Carr states:
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 . . . “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.” Out ability to interpret text, to make rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
As a biblical scholar, this is troubling to me. The Bible is not exactly a book that rewards skimming. Of course, the style of biblical study that we do now is very different than that done by Christians and Jews throughout most of our history, since easily flipping back and forth between passages became possible only when we developed the technology to print comparatively small books that contained the entire Bible. And up until the last few centuries, the vast majority of Christians didn’t read the Bible themselves; they only heard it read, usually in the setting of worship.
Of course, Carr is aware of history enough to know that previous changes in technology also changed our way of thinking, so he admits that his predictions of doom may not come to pass. After all, as he points out, Socrates lamented the spread of writing, predicting that it would lead to people receiving information without receiving instruction in critical thinking (a charge that has also been leveled against the Internet). But while some of Socrates predictions concerning the effects of writing did come to pass, writing has also benefited us in ways that he could not have imagined. The same is true of the Internet. We do, however, need to recognize that the boon of the Internet also carries with it the possible bane of losing the ability to read deeply.
I have to admit that my own experience mirrors that of Carr. It takes more of an effort for me to read large sections of text (with the exception of fiction). I used to attribute this to the fact that I am getting older2 or to my depression3. But now I know the truth: the Internet maked me unsmart.