Date: 2008-07-13 23:41 Subject: I can blog again Security: Public

I haven't really felt free to blog for about five months now. That's because there was one big thing gnawing away at me, and I couldn't write about it, and that made it nearly impossible to write about anything else. The big thing was that I was applying for a job at a large purveyor of sports-related clothing near Portland, Oregon whose name rhymes with Mikey (of Life Cereal fame). Now I've got the job, which I'll be starting roughly the second week of August. It's an extraordinary opportunity; in the next year, I'll have the chance to build my own team, travel several times to Europe, and get to know a whole new part of the country. But this was not an easy decision, even though the company I work for now is having all kinds of financial problems. So I have a number of observations, ruminations, and memories to catch up on in the next few weeks. I will try to be diligent.

Date: 2008-07-13 23:56 Subject: An article that made me slow down and think Security: Public

I came across an Atlantic Monthy article the other day wherein the author, Nicholas Carr, ponders if Google is "making us stupid." The gist of the article, in case you are feeling too rushed or scattered or just plain impatient to read it yourself, is that the Internet is teaching us all how to read differently, in easily digested snippets, which is a kind of reading very different from what a book or a long article requires. Carr writes, "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." He wonders, based on some anecdotal evidence, if we are on the verge of collectively losing our ability to read deeply.

Now, I'm typically very skeptical of this kind of neo-Luddite argument. For instance, I don't own a game console or anything, but I don't see that the advent of video games has had a particularly stupefying effect; on the contrary, video game makers have been scrambling for years to deliver games that satisfy the craving for texture and complexity that gamers are looking for.

But Carr's article threw me for a loop because I realized I was reading it in exactly the way he described, skimming, looking for the key information, then moving on. It's something I do a lot these days, even when I do pick up a book, although in my case, I'm not convinced it's the Web that's led me to it. I tend to read superficially when I'm tired or stressed (which I've been for months), or when I'm questioning the value of what I'm reading. Maybe I was just skimming Carr's article because I had a preconception of what I was going to find--another neo-Luddite argument--and I wasn't sure I wanted to spend a lot of time on it.

Nevertheless, I know what he means about the experience of deep reading: "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds." I read that sentence, and I decided to go back to the beginning of the article and start again, read every sentence carefully, and try to pick up on the intellectual vibrations that might be stirring in my head.

One thing the article made me think about was a grad school project my brother described recently, where he and others are thinking about the elements of a search engine that actually searches in the way people think. For instance, if I type in, "Who are three possible candidates for the worst President in history, and why?", the ideal search engine would return pages that actually attempt to answer the question in some fashion, just as a really good research librarian would. (Google's response would probably be a cluster of Daily Kos and Wikipedia pages.) Maybe the Internet is teaching us all to skim the surface; or maybe we are already starting to recognize the limitations of the Google approach to information, and the next generation of search engines will lead us back into the depths.

Another thing I thought about was my long-held opinion that what John Gardner once called the "architectonic" novel (e.g., Anna Karenina or David Copperfield or Invisible Man) is going the way of the epic poem and the morality play, becoming, for most people who are not specialists, unreadable. That this is the case seems incontrovertible when you look at what gets published year in and year out; but then again, millions of people were able to follow the multiple intersecting plot lines and interpret the visual symbolism of TV shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood. So maybe our capacity for "deep reading" isn't waning; maybe it's just being applied elsewhere. (Although I do take the point that reading, as an activity, does things physically in the brain that staring at a screen simply doesn't do.)

Or maybe this is another case of a cultural critic detecting a cultural crisis because he's starting from the false premise that there was ever a time when things were qualitatively different than they are now. Some of Carr's friends have hit middle age and found they can't concentrate on books any more. Was it any different with guys who hit middle age fifty years ago? Is it the Internet or is it simple aging ... or hormones ... or the fact that life has so many more demands on our time when we're 38 than it did when we were 18?

I offer a challenge to everyone who sees this post. Do what I did. Go to the link (as long as the article is still available and free) and read it--closely and carefully. Can you actually do it? If so, take the time to think about it. Do you agree with Carr's argument? Do you think his evidence is strong? What reverberations do you hear?