One good reason to quit blogging

There are, of course, some reasons to keep blogging. Yet, if I ever thought this had become a personal problem for me, I'd quit in a heartbeat.

Leonard Pitts in his nationally syndicated column, worries that he's forgotten how to read ("Help! My brains' stuck in the Web," Charlotte Observer, June 16, 2008):

I had thought it was just me.

In reading the cover story in the new issue of The Atlantic, however, I have learned that I am not alone. There are at least two of us who have forgotten how to read.

I do not mean that I have lost the ability to decode letters into words. I mean, rather, that I am finding it increasingly difficult to read deeply, to muster the focus and concentration necessary to wrestle any text longer than a paragraph or more intellectually demanding than a TV listing.

My idea of fun has always been to retire to a quiet corner with a thick newspaper or a thicker book and disappear inside. But that has become progressively harder to do in recent years. More and more, I have to do my reading in short bursts; anything longer and I start drowsing over the page even though I'm not sleepy, or fidgeting about checking e-mail, visiting that favorite Web site, even though I checked the one and visited the other just minutes ago.

I've tried to figure out why my concentration was shot, but no explanation satisfied: I watch less television than most folks and am no more busy than I was 10 years ago.

Our hard drives altered?

Now, author Nicholas Carr posits a new theory. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he notes that he and many of his literary friends report the same experience, leading him to wonder if the Internet is rewiring our very brains, altering the hard drive of the human computer. The culture of hyperlinks, blogs and search engines that return more results than you could read in a lifetime is, he argues, changing the way we read and, indeed, think.

You hardly need me to sell you on the benefits of the Internet. Sitting at her desk, the average human being now has instant access to a vast universe of information.

But what if the very vastness of that universe, the very fact of so much to know and so little time to know it in, requires a tradeoff in concentration and focus? We may have more options, but we're still dealing with the same 24-hour days we've always had. The Internet does little to filter or prioritize the information it retrieves – it simply dumps it on your head and leaves it to you to figure out. So perhaps it is to be expected that we learn to skim and scan information, but lose the ability to absorb and analyze it.

A couple of weeks ago, I read Scott McClellan's book, What Happened for this column. Deadlines being what they are, I had to wolf down the last 200 pages in a single day. I chose an uncomfortable chair, to minimize the danger of dozing off, and allowed myself only one Internet break.

I would read this book. Nothing else. Just read.

It was difficult. I felt like I was getting away with something, like when you slip out of the office to catch a matinee. Indeed, I'd have felt less guilty sitting in a matinee. I had to keep reminding myself that this was OK, that, indeed, this was work.

Read the rest of the article. It will make you think.

Of related interest:

• Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google( (W.W. Norton, 2008)
  
  
• Nicholas Carr, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).