Is the internet weakening our ability to read?

There’s a striking passage in the Confessions, where St Augustine describes his surprise when he stumbles across Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading. Augustine observes that “when he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Often, when we came to see him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” Augustine was witnessing what, we may term, a paradigm shift from a largely oral idiom to a written idiom, where the thinking subject internalises the word and becomes not just one who reads but a reader.

But this shift, Nicholas Carr believes, also marks a significant cognitive development with brain function being stimulated and exercised in new ways. For centuries, the commonly held neurological view was that, after the malleability of childhood and youth, our brains became structurally fixed. In this mechanistic understanding, the brain was like a combustion engine, its many parts having a specific character and function. If any deviance from these functions occurred the circuits of the brain, like those of the engine, would begin to break down. Such an understanding of the brain has recently been called into question and it appears that our brains are more “plastic” than previously thought. With repetitive thought and action, the neural circuits of the brain appear to develop and strengthen.



Augustine witnessed the shift from an oral to a literate culture but now there appears to be a further shift to an electronic vernacular, which, again, will provide challenges at the neural and cultural level. We are witnessing the digitilisation of text. It is conceivable that all the libraries of the world will be stored on a computer and accessed via the i-book in your hand. At the forefront of this revolution is Google that aims to scan every book ever printed and make them “discoverable and searchable online.”

In comparative terms, is this anything more than the change from vinyl to c.d that many of us experienced in the twentieth century? Does it matter if our texts are printed or digitalised, isn't this just a technological development which only the Luddite would see as threatening? Well, though there may have been benefits from the move from vinyl to c.d and more recently, to download, there have also been losses. No one listens to an album sequentially from track one to track twelve these days. The idea of artistic coherence, at least in the mind of the majority of listeners, has been lost. Instead the listener flits from track to track until they land upon something aurally attractive and then, when they are satisfied or their attention is tested, they move on. Our ability to listen to music - pop, jazz or classical - in a concentrated, uninterrupted fashion is challenged. It is not just that the music or the methods by which we listen to music have changed, what is changing is the very act of listening itself. Listening for the "still, sad music of humanity" has become an activity associated with a bygone age.

Similarly, having a digitalised text may have many benefits, such as easy access to a particular book but there are also likely to be losses. For example, what happens to the cohesion of a text? What happens to the intellectual discipline of following an argument? What happens when we stop exercising our more reflective faculties, when a text becomes just hyperlinked data, something to scroll rather than an integrated body of learning to be thought through? What happens to the architecture of our brains when we start thinking like this? Nicholas Carr writes ominously:

For Google, with its faith in efficiency as the ultimate good and its attendant desire "to get users in and out really quickly," the unbinding of the book entails no loss, only gain. Google Book Search manager Adam Mathes grants that "books often live a vibrant life offline," but he says that they'll be able "to live an even more exciting life online." What does it mean for a book to lead a more exciting life? Searchability is only the beginning. Google wants us, it says, to be able to "slice and dice" the contents of the digitized books we discover, to do all the "linking, sharing, and aggregating" that are routine with Web content but that "you can't easily do with physical books...The great library that Google is rushing to create shouldn't be confused with the libraries we've known up until now. It's not a library of books. It's a library of snippets.

Is the internet playing with our minds?

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene towards the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 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.”
The Shallows, Nicholas Carr

Did you get to the end of the above quotation without pressing a link or playing the video? Reading anything on the internet is full of distractions, pop-ups, siren voices inviting us to click, link, search and surf. Unless I make the effort to print an article from the internet, I invariably don’t read it from beginning to end. Online I’ll skim read it and if it doesn’t hold my attention or I find it too difficult, I’m back to the Google search engine. Even when I am reading, I catch myself taking sneaky glances at my e-mails, Statcounter, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc. I am snacking or grazing on information, images and ideas. I have the suspicion that when I log into the internet, I am logging out of my usual ways of thinking. Reading a book and reading a blog or an article on a website feel like two cognitively different experiences. But, are they? And if they are, does it really matter?

Of course, the fact that all this immense store of data on the internet is just a click away is widely accepted as having radically benefited mankind. This is hard to dispute and only the Luddite would argue that we would be better off without the internet. When Tim Berners-Lee composed the code for the world wide web, the way human beings collected and transmitted information and ideas changed for ever. Now, with a quick Google search, I can find out within seconds that, for example, A Space Odyssey was released in 1968. No more traipsing to the library and wandering the stacks. For cherry picking information (the way I mostly use the net) I find the internet invaluable, but there are moments when I wonder how helpful it is if we want to think a bit deeper about things and ideas? How is the internet affecting our cognitive faculties and our ability to think more seriously?

One of the criticisms of this blog is that it is not bloggish enough. It’s not punchy, pithy or journalistic. It’s not angry, opinionated or flashy. The paragraphs are too long, the language too literary and rhetorical, the ideas too culturally arcane. These criticisms are spot on. But that’s the kind of blog I chose to create. Yes, there are links and videos, but I wanted to see if it was possible to put ideas and their expression at the centre of this medium in a way that was less feverish and less about convenience. I wondered if the effort and patience that have been essential requirements when reading a book could still be part of reading a blog? I’m not sure. And I become positively pessimistic when I read the pathologist Bruce Friedman, who also blogs about the use of computers in medicine, admit, “I can’t read War and Peace anymore, I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” I am beginning to suspect that this experience is not uncommon.

I think something is happening to our minds (or, at least, to my mind). We appear to be moving from a linear, narrative processing of information (largely influenced by the book) to something more staccato and disjointed (largely influenced by the Internet). A more contemplative, focused reading of material is being replaced by a hurried, superficial reading that fillets essays and articles for the “essential” facts and discards the rest as superfluous waste. We are becoming, in the words of one commentator, “skilled hunters,” butchering the involved, challenging argument for the gobbet, soundbite, snazzy snippet.

It appears I’m not the only one that has these concerns. In his book, The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Nicholas Carr examines similar anxieties but places them in a broader technological context. He argues that there is growing scientific evidence which shows the internet is changing the way our brains function and that for all the benefits of the internet, there may also be real losses. Like the computer, HAL, Carr suggests that our minds may be going and being replaced with a radically new synaptic organization:

For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenburg’s printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the centre of art, science and society. As supple as it is subtle, it’s been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday’s mind.

The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Nicholas Carr, Atlantic Books, London, 2010