

Is The Times making you stupid? - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/08/is-times-making-you-stupid.html

======
barrkel
Nicholas Carr is a technophobe, bordering on Luddite, and has been for as long
as I have been reading him. It's not just this focus - the alleged harm of
modern technology to the way we think - but he also attacked the idea that IT
could ever be a sustainable advantage to businesses (Does IT Matter / IT
Doesn't Matter). He seems to try to turn everything he reads against
technological change for the sake of fighting technological change itself,
rather than because of a unifying reason.

~~~
shrikant
"Professional troll" is more appropriate - I think he genuinely knows what
kind of reaction his writing will provoke, and goes straight for the jugular.

~~~
NathanKP
The important thing is that he is making money selling books about his
opinions. Interestingly many classic writers (think Jonathan Swift) were
professional trolls in their time. Writing something that elicits strong
emotions and opinions guarantees that people will talk about it, meaning more
publicity for the book.

------
scotty79
>> I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m
reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy
article. [...] Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get
fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as
though I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading
that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

> The author is Nicholas Carr. According to Wikipedia Mr Carr was both in 1959
> and thus is now 51. Like me, Mr Carr is aging, unlike me Mr Carr seems to be
> blaming changes in the operation of his mind on the Internet.

I'm 31 and I feel same change in how my mind works when confronted with a book
as Nicolas Carr does. I can't blame aging and I've spent most of my time for
last few years reading the internet so there might be something to it.

It might not necessarily be bad. I was always impatient with books that had
low ideas/wordcount quotient. I couldn't force myself to read Hobbit and I
fell asleep on Bladerunner at the same time immensly enjoying short stories by
Henry Kuttner. I think that internet just brought down my tolerance to level I
never expeirenced before.

I can't even imagine what would happen to my brain if I fed myself with TV or
The Times at the same rate as I'm feeding myself with internet.

~~~
barrkel
I'm 30 and I have no difficulty reading long books, nor watching Bladerunner.
Actually I prefer long, slow-paced movies, especially the kind Sergio Leone
made. And I've been doing this computer business since at least the age of 11.

There's a risk of bias confirmation here. Seek and ye shall find: you look for
what you agree with, and you'll find it. You need to look for counterexamples
too.

~~~
scotty79
Great so there are different kinds of people. You prefer slower pace, I need
more ideas per absorbed data unit to keep being interested.

My expeiriences with computers started probably more or less as early as yours
(although I can't with clear concience call them business) but It's not about
computers. It's about internet content.

I was always impatient but I see my impatience significantly grown over the
last few years as I read internet blogs and sites like digg, HN and similar. I
reached the point when I can start reading Terry's Pratchett new book, stop
after few pages and forget it for weeks or months.

Maybe you don't spend as much time reading internet as I do (I really can't
imagine how could I read more of it) or it has less (or no) effect on you but
that doesn't change the probability of such correlation occur at least for
some people.

~~~
jleyank
I've always blamed TV for the loss of attention span - passive consumption.
The internet, usually, is (more) active consumption, although you can make the
point that it delivers in small packets.

Might be symptomatic of life in general, as people put out less effort to do
anything - serious reading, like serious anything, requires some effort.

~~~
sesqu
Internet consumption isn't, at present, very active; it's voluminous. There's
so ridiculously much to consume, I find I'm growing impatient merely because I
must demand density to get through the mass. This is a problem for me, since
I'm not convinced dense stuff sticks.

There are also happiness implications.

------
corin_
Agree with the criticism of the article, disagree with the title of the post -
you'll find dumb opinions in every newspaper, magazine and book in the world,
oh and on the internet too. (Personally I'm a Guardian reader, though I have a
subscription to Times online that I rarely use.)

From personal experience, I'd say that the internet has made me read less
books, just because there are many things I tend to prioritise above them...
but when I do find the time I can still get through them in exactly the same
way I did when I was ten years old, and in the week that I spend every year in
the countryside with no internet, and all data on my blackberry disabled, I
get through books as fast as anything (maybe I should count how many I read in
a week when I go away next month).

edit: Comment from The Times site:

"Very interesting article. I use the Internet extensively for research and I
tend to agree with the writer's analysis of how this can affect concentration.
However, I am not part of the "younger generation" so I still live in many
ways according to the pre-Internet era."

Amazing that she's able to agree with the point while claiming that she
herself isn't affected...

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petercooper
_"The net engages all our senses" (of which we have 5)_

That's a cliché. Aristotle noted five, but there are others, including
proprioception (sense of location of one's self), pain, and balance. This only
serves to invalidate Carr's point further, of course!

I bought The Times on Saturday too. I usually only buy the Sunday Times but
thought I'd give it a go. It's not a patch on the Sunday Times, alas, but I
couldn't blame the editors for giving a little time to an external contributor
with Carr's stature.

~~~
ww520
Wiki lists 10 and more senses in human body.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense>

Without the tech power of the net, I would have no clue we have so many
senses.

------
tmsh
I expect to be downvoted as the signal that I would indicate is not exactly on
the same wavelength as most -- and so you'll probably interpret it as noise.

However, I think Nicholas Carr's points are not completely without value. The
problem is if you attach qualitative judgment to it (the changing mind is good
/ bad, etc.) -- because it's very difficult to judge those things without
knowing the future. For instance, take this note from the post:

 _UPDATE. A reader reminded me that Socrates was worried about the impact of
written arguments many centuries ago. People have been wailing about
technology spoiling everything for a long time._

Arguably, this 'linear' way of thinking that he argues pre-Internet writing
cultivated -- arguably, that has real limitations. If you've ever studied
ancient Greek, you might've noticed how anti-linear the language is (because
of variable word order, cases, tenses, particles, etc.). In many ways Greek
was a much more powerful way of thinking. And in many ways it works better in
an oral environment. There is perhaps a reason that the Iliad and the Odyssey
were created as oral poetry. As with a lot of archaic lyric and choral poetry
that later formed the basis for Greek drama. And similarly, Socratic argument
is something like the antithesis of a 'linear' mind (or certainly it
complicates it).

So one might argue that linearity was a major problem that prevented, in
certain areas, more dynamic, Renaissance-like thought until other languages
developed a sufficiently rich and malleable base. Elizabethan English is
anything but linear. Shakespeare, the spark and/or a central figure of that,
was not linear in the written sense. 'Would that he had blotted a thousand
lines...' was the general consensus until people paid better attention to his
antilinearity, arguably.

But I mention all of this because it's important to study how different
languages and mediums affect how we think. It's unlikely that anyone will
figure out the present way of thinking, definitively, during the present. But
I admire Nicholas Carr for trying (if I don't admire his judgments).

Perhaps he gets it completely wrong. Perhaps the internet allows us to have a
non-linear renaissance of discourse, etc. But being precisely wrong is often
half the battle, at least among analytical understandings of how mediums work,
etc.

Or take Hacker News. The fact that you can't edit something that you post
after a certain amount of time in conjunction with comments being attached a
numerical 'value' from up/downmodding -- could dramatically affect what types
of things are discussed here. I can understand the rationale (what's said is
said -- editing after the fact is potentially disingenuous). However, people
in turn may be less willing to take argumentative risks because they fear
being locked into a 'trial' of an idea. Maybe this is good (for signal/noise).
Maybe this is bad (low discursive risks, low discursive rewards). And I'm sure
there are many other factors. But arguably it's worth thinking about all the
effects of any type of medium.

~~~
jerf
If I were going to downmod you, it would be because you go on for rather a
while about an ill-defined concept, backed by vague references to hundreds of
years at a time as if they could somehow be meaningfully captured by such a
quick sketch. How do we measure "linearity"? How do you address the fact that
regardless of the language, human text and speech is a serialization of an
arbitrarily interlinked concept? (And thank goodness I can fall back on
programmer-jargon to ask that question, I'm so very glad I didn't have to type
that in non-jargon.) What _is_ linearity, exactly?

There very way may be sharp, clear answers you can give me that will shut me
down, in which case I will graciously admit it. But I don't know what they may
be.

~~~
tmsh
I do speak in very, very general terms here.

But I think you can still extract valuable insights if you're careful and you
qualify these abstractions. It could be useful to analyze what the nature of
an HN signal is? Could be very-low on argumentative properties. And very high
on objective, factual properties. This could be good. But it could be a
mistake then to presume that this is a 'forum' in which
discursive/argumentative qualities are usually a bit more flexibly welcomed,
etc.

~~~
jerf
"But I think you can still extract valuable insights if you're careful and you
qualify these abstractions."

Err, yes, but were you planning on offering any such careful qualifications?
_I_ can't explain your ideas to _you_.

~~~
tmsh
Ok. Linearity isn't my term -- it's jgc's. But I presume he and Carr mean
something like a sustained engagement via a body of text. In essay writing,
this usually involves multiple revisions, again and again, across the same
space. In essay reading, this usually involves a closer level of engagement
with a text and its progression than is otherwise normal -- somehow, via its
thoroughness, it challenges us.

The disadvantages with this type of approach are that you can get off base.
Hence, something more dynamic, with feedback (in the form of a Socratic
dialogue, etc.) can be much more useful. Perhaps the Internet has the
potential for being more Socratic -- was my point before. But only if we
understand exactly how it fits -- how, arguably, we've been waiting for this,
in our linearity, for a long time. But if we abuse its dynamic qualities, we
might totally lose it. So Nick Carr by reminding us that we might think about
these things -- is useful.

The advantages of the linear approach are that by dwelling with something in
an engaged manner -- you can often extract value that otherwise superficial
readings don't. At some point all ideas come into contact with each other, and
are validated, etc. But arguably by giving people more space to develop their
ideas -- sort of mentioned in this article:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html>

\-- you extract more value.

~~~
tygorius
Your thesis seems rather a reach to me. Socratic dialogues are a sequential
form -- earlier points lay the groundwork for later ones, for example.

I'm not an expert on the ancient Greeks, but the last I heard there wasn't
much evidence of a written language during the Greek Dark Ages. But to jump
from what we know of Greek culture from written remnants (plays and poetry) it
would seem to place a great deal of emphasis on "linearity".

Take the Method of Loci used to, ahem, memorize the "linear" points of a
speech or argument. While it's true that you can access points at random, that
doesn't take away from the fact that they are staged and memorized in a
specific order for presentation.

Bottom line, I think you're accepting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis uncritically.
It seems so reasonable, but when you get down to specifics -- like the actual
number of words for snow in English and Innuit -- it just doesn't pan out.
Similarly, I think anyone who's read Adler and Van Doren's pre-Internet "How
to Read a Book" would scoff at Carr's notion that books can't be an
interactive medium. People can be mentally lazy using any media.

~~~
tmsh
The Method of Loci sounds very interesting (as well as the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis).

But if we're still presuming that speech is inherently linear, I think we're
mistaking how the brain abstracts those sequences of texts. I haven't read the
literature at all really, but I read On Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins), and my
sense was that this lexing pass that happens when we greet language is
happening very much in isolation before we start adding semantic meaning with
'hierarchies' or tree structures, etc. So the 'give off' from that linear
feeding of word after word is pretty minimal.

Imho, the Method of Loci would apply greatly to how Greek language and
literature works. There is a lot more investment of ideas into spatially
separate, almost physical objects (Love is very much a physical god, etc.).
This perhaps has the advantage of engaging the participant with those ideas
more -- by activating the methods we use in our spatial reasoning. Similarly,
in language, the flexibility of the word order really requires that you stack
words in different locations, flexibly.

We read the Socratic dialogues linearly -- and Socrates leads us on what seems
like a preordained line. But really there are lots of stacks and queues
involved. It's a pretty dynamic process of finally finding a linear coherent
structure that we're comfortable with. So in my mind it's still very dynamic.

But you make interesting points... Perhaps the best way to evoke the most
information with language is to be aware of the distinction between the
sequential and dynamic -- and to maximize the good parts of both. They're
really yin and yang with each other -- great essay writing is a linear
product, made of dynamic error-checking at each step, etc.

------
emanuer
I have two arguments:

1\. Searching The Internet Increases Brain Function
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081014111043.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081014111043.htm)

2\. The average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s
I.Q. test <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html>

Note: I have not read Mr Carr's article and I most certainly will not (bad for
my blood pressure). However I do have the strong believe that we get smarter
every year (as a species in general) and to some extend this increase in
cognitive abilities has to be attributed to the emergence of the World Wide
Web. (I guess better nutrition is the main factor for our sharper brains).

------
d3vvnull
I've actually been reading more books since I started using the Web. There is
no doubt in my mind that reading web content engages different kinds of
reading skills and requires different kinds of reading discipline. Because so
much information is hyper-linked in the web it is easy to get off the main
thread of a subject and find yourself reading about a topic that had very
little to do with the topic of origin. And that's where the special discipline
comes into play, keeping the mind on track and knowing how deep you need to
pursue links that will help you more completely grasp the original topic. In
some printed non-fiction texts, footnotes allow you a similar ability to do
this, though these are more often citations than clarifications. We don't need
as much discipline to keep ourselves to the book, because the book itself
doesn't offer the same convenient ability to hyperlink to the text referenced
in the footnote that a web page does. In the world of books, we are forced to
enrich our understanding of our text by following up with other books.

This does mean that it can be much easier to do research on the web, because
of the immediacy of hyperlinks. However unless you are a careful reader, you
may not actually do research. Casual reading of web content without the
discipline amounts to just surfing. But surfing is not always bad, you might
surf for a while and then find yourself doing research when you encounter a
topic compelling enough to read more carefully.

------
Synthetase
Nicholas Carr is a pundit, not a neuroscientist. He is paid to come up with
neat and pretty ideas, not to be right.

------
telemachos
This is (obviously enough) a hot topic. My local Times ran an article
yesterday about a group of neuroscientists on a vacation away from technology
- the vacation itself being a kind of quasi-experiment. I've just started
reading it, but it seems a lot more open-ended or essayistic than the Carr
piece.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html?_r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html?_r=1&ref=technology&pagewanted=all)

~~~
corin_
Completely off-topic: I don't think I've ever seen anyone refer to NYT as "my
local Times" before. I liked seeing that.

------
jrockway
_the linear, literary mind has been at the centre of art_

Books can be non-linear. Ever read Cryptonomicon?

~~~
alan-crowe
Treating a mathematics book as _linear_ pretty much guarantees that your
attempt to read it will fail. Reading a maths book is like playing a video
game. "Oh shit! I don't know what the author is on about?" = getting killed.
Going back to the start of the paragraph = restarting the level.

The game play is where you get out your pad of paper and try to construct a
example, draw a diagram,... Having notes from yesterday, when it made sense =
save point. If you cannot draw a diagram, understand your notes, whatever, you
are killed again and go back another level.

The initial author's emphasis on books being linear suggests a rather limited
range of reading.

------
stevejalim
So, does this mean the Times' paywall is a way of protecting netizens from
becoming stupid? ;o)

------
maushu
This is easy to fix, just stop aging... oh, wait.

~~~
epochwolf
Stopping aging is quite easy. I recommend a standard 2x4 and a little elbow
grease. (Note: multiple attempts may be required.)

------
DanielBMarkham
_Like me, Mr Carr is aging, unlike me Mr Carr seems to be blaming changes in
the operation of his mind on the Internet. I understand this, it's a way of
avoiding talking about death and deterioration._

Ouch. I stopped reading here. At the least it was a cheap shot. At most it was
a crude ad hominem. You're better than this, John.

But I'm sure the tech crowd will love it. Looks a good bit like pandering.

------
balding_n_tired
The NY Times is two papers in one dress: a serious newspaper reporting a range
of news including political, financial, and basic local stuff; an odd
consumerist provider of fluff and distraction. The second paper
(Sunday/Thursday Styles, much of the Sunday Magazine, much of the Arts &
Entertainment) may not be able to make you stupid, but it damned sure tries.

~~~
MichaelSalib
The article didn't appear in the New York Times but in a UK paper called The
Times.

~~~
balding_n_tired
My bad.

