In which I get worried over my faith in humanity

So the readings for this week's introductory digital history class are completed, and two thoughts came to mind. Well, more than only two thoughts, but you know what I mean. Today's post will deal with the first.

I felt surprise at certain opinions given in Nicholas Carr's Is Google Making us Stupid?. He (and his colleagues) claim that the internet, the new medium of choice for the late 20th century, had warped their minds to the point that they had lost the ability to concentrate on old-fashioned, hand-held, time-consuming books, or even long articles. Then could no longer focus their attention, and had no interest in doing so.

While the article is undoubtedly McLuhanesque in nature (his name is mentioned on the first page), with his famous "the medium is the message", one must remember that his statement was made more than 50 years ago. I took a Canadian media course in my last year of undergrad, and we discussed McLuhan and his overshadowed colleague, Harold Innis, whose theory can be related to "the medium biases the message". The effects of new technologies have been discussed for many years, such as in the new age of radio and television, as well as with the rise of daily newspapers. One need only to think about how a medium such as the nightly news or a newpaper biases the messages towards the sensationalistic, the quick, the snappy, the attention-grabbing, the famous newscaster line "and now... this" or the headlines in a newspaper (dead body found! taxes rising! Canadians getting fatter!). Our attention spans were being shortened for a much longer time than the 1980s/1990s/2000s. Were people worried about the effects? Of course. But were they having personal meltdowns and losing the ability to read an article from start to finish, to read a book, to concentrate longer than two minutes? I don't think so. So the question is, what makes the internet so different?

The fact that many of the people quoted in Carr's article are former "literary" types, as he calls them, makes me worry. It's one thing when someone who wasn't very inclined to read a book would rather skim an online article, but quite another when someone who loved to read has lost the ability. Is it really the ability, or just the interest? Part of me thinks this must be some sort of personal choice, even a laziness on their parts. Adapting to one medium is fine, but why does one need to lose other interests? This is a harsh opinion, and a personal one I admit, coming from someone who spends a lot of time online but can still spend hours reading a book. Maybe I'd just like to have faith that our brains can't really be permanently rewired thanks to the abundance of online sources and the prevalence of the internet in every facet of our daily lives. There's nothing wrong with adaptation, in fact its incredibly important (we're all here to hop on the digital history train, no?), but this loss makes me worry.

The internet isn't only here for skimming and skipping around - many valuable sources online are long in nature, and reading through it all at a fast pace is doing a disservice to those who spent so much time writing or digitizing those articles, and wasting a great opportunity to learn through a convenient medium. Take advantage!