stoopider?

Ian sent me an article from The Atlantic magazine (online, of course) that asks some interesting questions about reading and the way that we process information in the...information age? The article is called "Is Google Making Us Stupid."

The author's discussion of "deep reading" is what interested me most. Here are a few relevant passages:

"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."

(Given that his article is more than a few pages long, I found his commentary above amusing because it got me to thinking that if most people are like the author, they are likely to lose interest or focus before the end of the article).

"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. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture."

Hm.

I definitely find myself skimming online articles, particularly if they are on the longer side and I am not "hooked" right from the first paragraph. Since I spend practically my entire day reading articles, I suppose this is not surprising. However, I do have to say that my "deep reading" skills are still intact. I am still able to lose myself in a book and read for hours at a time without getting distracted. I'm sure the medium (book vs. computer screen) plays a role.