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.
"Professional troll" is more appropriate - I think he genuinely knows what kind of reaction his writing will provoke, and goes straight for the jugular.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm roughly your same age and have similar exposure to the internet, but have no problems reading a GOOD book or watching a GOOD long movie.
Content used to be hard to find. Either you had to get a recommendation from someone for a book or watch whatever happened to be on TV. This led to a lot of mindless consuming of stuff that people simply did not enjoy, but it was all they had. The internet has made me (and many others) acutely aware of the back button. If you don't like the content you can move on since there is so much else out there to pick from.
I now view books and movies the same way. If I don't like a movie I simply turn it off and pick another or go do something else. I do the same thing with books. If I'm not into it after 50 or so pages then I put it down and try something else. Why force myself through content that I don't enjoy?
Meh, I am 22, have been browsing the web since I was 10 years old, and have a hard time when I am away from it, but I can still sit down with a good book and read the entire thing cover to cover in no time flat. The last book I did that with was a re-read, Cryptonomicon. I sat down at 8 in the morning, finished it by 3 in the after noon with a couple of limited breaks to do some bodily business and get some food.
I can honestly say that with the Internet I have more of an appreciation for books because there are no distractions. Now maybe at age 22 I am still too young to really have felt the change that the Internet is supposedly to bring, maybe I have to give it more time, we shall see.
I've never understood how people can read that fast. Cryptonomicon is 918 pages; you read it at maybe 30 seconds a page. I've been reading for a long time (though I didn't get into books until my late teens), and I still read English at about 5 minutes per page. It took me weeks to get through Cryptonomicon.
30 seconds a page is pretty fast (especially for a book like Cryptonomicon, where you'd want to stop and think every now and then) but five minutes a page would be really slow. You could read it out loud faster than that. Hell, most people could type it faster than that.
It might be worth your while spending a few hours every day for a week learning to speed-read. You can probably get instructions elsewhere, but it just involves a metronome and dragging your finger across the page in time with it. You can get reasonably fast (~1000wpm) pretty fast once you overcome the need to (a) sound it out in your head as you read and (b) point your eyes directly at every word.
Maximizing words-per-minute throughput is not a useful goal for reading; what about comprehension?
(I find I get distracted more easily these days; I suspect too much use of the internet has damaged my ability to focus for hours on end on a book. I catch myself looking away from the page and zoning out every couple of minutes. That is something to work on -- maintaining focus on the task at hand -- and so I'm trying to re-train myself to read books.)
Comprehension tends to increase as WPM increases up to 500 or so WMP. Above 500WPM the trend is less clear and probably depends on the individual and how redundant the text.
As I understand it the faster you read the more stuff you can keep in short term memory so the easier it is to make connections though different sections of text.
At the extreme consider how hard it would be to read one page of a book over the course of a year.
I agree with you in that the internet has made me lose my concentration. I get easily distracted while I at my laptop, browsing the web. My solution was to go back to reading more books than before and I unlike you I am not distracted when I am away from my computer. Recently I documented my experience here: http://www.diovo.com/2010/08/books-vs-blogs/
At the same time, I can understand that this may not be the case with some other people (like jgc). Ultimately there is no point in fighting over this. What works for you, works for you.
I used to sit in front of the TV for a long time watching Saturday cartoons when I was young. Now I can't sit through one minute of them (unless if it's Simpsons or South Park).
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...
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I suppose my point was to challenge your signal-sensing apparatus. The problem of putting signal v. noise on a pedestal is that we take for granted what the shape of good signals looks like.
Again, this would be a valid criticism if I had simply said:
'I expect to be downvoted.'
Or if I were trying to game the system or otherwise accumulate points. As odd as it is to imagine though, that's not actually my point. My point, to be direct, is that:
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.
Though I don't mean to be argumentative (esp. by repeating myself). But I mean you raise a good point. However, it's not like I just signed up for HN yesterday. I've been reading this for a year or so, and I recognize what will be downvoted. Maybe I'm doing it on purpose though? Maybe I want you to downvote me and then think about it? What I often get after -- and am always downvoted for -- is that there are large differences within this category of 'trolling', which we assume everyone who isn't being immediately, objectively informative is a part of. There are unhelpful trolls, for sure. But there are also helpful trolls. You could even go so far as to say: people like Socrates -- who arguably contribute more to the difficult, valuable, formative stages of things like science than anyone else. I'm just trying to remind people to not get too complacent about what a good signal looks like.
PS: Your comment can easily be read as: to be argumentative I'm doing /this/ on purpose. I believe there are helpful trolls /and I am trying to be one./ It's sitting at the noise floor, so why spend the time looking for a deeper meaning?
Note: The above actually said vary little wasted a lot of words and is intended as an example of what no to do while using vaguely insulting weasel words for the fun of it (can easily be read as etc).
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.
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.
