Zombie Will Think for Food

Hey, have you seen that article in The Atlantic about how The Internet is making us stupid so as to more easily overthrow us when the inevitable robot revolution finally comes to pass?

The article, by Nicholas Carr, is long (does that deter you? Should it?) and very interesting, but his point can be summed up thusly:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.”

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

When I was auditing that class on linguistics, we talked a lot about how this thing we call The Online is changing the way we read. Not only is our reading changing, but our writing, as well, especially for those of us who do a lot of web writing. For example, you see that big ass excerpt up there? I broke it up into two paragraphs because I know how web writing works—we don’t want to work to absorb our information.

Carr provides an apt analogy with which I can’t help but quibble:

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I feel you, man, but seriously—have you ever seen a guy on a Jet Ski? It’s IMPOSSIBLE to be unhappy on a Jet Ski.

See what I did there? I broke up the text with a quip and a photo so as to trick you into reading on. I joke, but I share Carr’s fears about how the internet is changing the way I read. The evolution of the written word has reached a point where interactivity is the name of the game; hypertext allows you to customize a comprehensive reading experience, but at what cost?

How many windows do you have open on your screen right now? I have 10, and that doesn’t include the sheets of paper strewn across my desk that I’m using to write an article—one that will most certainly be posted online.

Professional blogging is becoming a more and more viable career path these days, but I think it won’t be viable for me. Sure, I talk a big game about how great it would be to write for a Gawker blog, but I can’t imagine programming myself that way—all about the immediacy of information and the race to be the first to present said information. Would I want to sit down with a good book of poetry at the end of the night? In the oft-quoted (and misunderstood) words of Auden, “poetry makes nothing happen,” and we are as of late, if nothing else, a culture of happening (but not The Happening, ’cause I hear that movie sucks).

Should we, as he assures that we should, be skeptical of Carr’s skepticism? Or is the robot war close at hand? Over the last few months, I’ve considered “unplugging” for a couple evenings a week. Not just abstaining from my computer (majestic though it may be), but TV, too, in order to create a couple “screen-free” evenings for reading of the more traditional, book variety. For now, at least, it seems like a good start.

EDIT: Joel wrote a notable piece over at Tropophilia some months back about whether the book as we know it is going out of style. My response to his post was to babble about how exciting the evolution of reading is, and while I still agree that perhaps this distracted type of e-reading is more reflective and comfortable for the brain, further analysis on my part urges me to champion that hard work is good for us, and everyone should go read a good poem now, please.