On Saturday (Sometimes) I'm a Litblogger

Have you seen the article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? The author, Nicholas Carr, suggests that our love affair with the Internet is rearranging the neural pathways in our brains, dis-inclining us to careful, extended focus, making us impatient skimmers instead of readers. Now, I happen to know that Carr says all this not because I've read the article, but because I've skimmed a blogpost about the article over at From Where I Sit.

So I'm guessing the author's on to something. Carr puts it this way:

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.

If all this is real--I mean on a culture-wide level--and if it is truly a long-term trend, then sitting all morning with a good book is becoming increasingly counter-cultural and even perhaps counter-chemical (in terms of brain chemistry). It feels that way for me sometimes. The people I know who are most plugged in culturally, most at home in the tech-age, are the people I least expect to be curling up with a good book.

I myself sense at times a mental push-pull when I sit down to read. As if I am swimming upstream, as it were, against an internal tendency or trend. If all this is so, then reading becomes all the more a kind of discipline, like meditation or chosen silence. Let me always be a rebel in the cause of "deep reading." Happily against the grain, that's me. In choosing to read, rather than skim, we choose the great good that is a quiet journey of the mind. When all about us our friends are riding roller-coasters, we choose a raft on a slow river. More and more these days, I want to be a defender of this waning practice.

And now I'm going to get off the computer, throw a load in the washing machine, and sit down with a mug of java and a good book.

Oh, by the way, I'm reading Margaret Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. It's beautifully slow and deep. I'm loving it.