Voices en Español

I recently sent a book to one of my blogging buddies. It was the second book I had sent him in just a couple of months. He sent a “thank you” email but mentioned that he was going to need to find time to read it since he was still making his way through the first book I had sent. Turns out that my blogger friend has come down with an increasingly common ailment: Internet fatigue.  “Think I need to take a sabbatical away from the Internet for a while,” he wrote. “It just seems to be consuming too much of my time.”

How many of us can relate to that statement, huh?

In an excellent article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“, Nicholas Carr writes compellingly about what the Internet is doing to our brains.

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.

Boy oh boy, this Carr dude is reading my mind….

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

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.

(Click here to read Nicholas Carr’s full article in The Atlantic.)

What do you think? Has the Internet rewired your mental circuits and changed the way you process info? Have we become too dependent on Google to filter, process and “pre-digest” information for us? Is it too much of a good thing? Or is it now something so integral to our way of life, like breathing, that without, we’ll die?