The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stoopid?

This article by Nicholas Carr in the current Atlantic Monthly has been engendering a fair amount of discussion around the web, mostly centering on the following passages:

"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. "

snip

"For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. 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."

I flit about the internets about as much as anyone, but I can't personally say that I have experienced the phenomenon that Carr describes. I read as many books as I ever have and still keep a large number of books going at the same time. This is a habit Steve and I share that we have discussed here a number of times and something I've done since I learned to read. I've also always been a fast reader. In high school, I dropped out of a speed-reading class when I found my own "system" already had me reading at speeds they were trying to teach.

The only change I can really see in my reading habits is that I have an increasing tendency to read non-fiction in a non-linear fashion. I read lots of history and find I often jump into sections of books that I find most interesting and then will back-track to fill in context if I need it. Sometimes I find I have read almost an entire book with the chapters in reverse order.

I have been seeing this as something positive and feeling that I am reading more efficiently - digging out data I want more quickly than plodding from pages 1 to n. It hadn't occurred to me that this might be an "internet effect" if indeed it is.

I've been wondering how the people who hang out here at the Querencia blog feel about this. Do you believe the internet is changing the way you read and "remapping" your circuitry?