«I JUST READ EVERYTHING»

All that internet browsing has reduced our ability to concentrate on long-form reading, and the greatest victim has been the book. Carr is not merely talking about dumbing down. What he posits is more significant: that human culture has been built steadily over our literate history by deep and meditative reading, and the internet threatens to undo this process. Many of us, for instance, have read War and Peace in a calm and meditative state, and absorbed not only the words and information but also the ideas and significances, and transferred those into our long-term memory. As such, each of us carries part of the weight of human culture in our minds. Should we abandon the book, we would also abandon this collective knowledge, leaving it to be arbitrarily outsourced to Google searches and Wikipedia. Carr is also deeply wedded to the predominance of the single linear thought that is represented by the book – a closed form without hyperlinks, bright flashing adverts and email distractions. He recalls Steven Johnson's brilliant line in Everything Bad is Good For You that reading a book "understimulates the senses", and argues that this is a good thing. But what Johnson actually wrote in Everything Bad... pre-empts Carr. Johnson found that the human brain can deal with far more than a mere linear narrative and has a natural hunger for complex thought, from the intricate political and cultural references in The Simpsons to the expansiveness of networked computer games. Witness, also, the phenomenon of The Wire. It was not a book, but was frequently referred to as Dickensian, required an extended attention span, and has been committed to our culture as a 21st-century reference point. It could hardly be called shallow or easily forgotten.

-The Independent
Sept 19 2010