From Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in next month’s Atlantic:
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet….
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded…. But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. 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’m not the only one.
No, friend, you’re not, which is why I’m happy to introduce a new feature, previously available only on airplanes and in movie theaters, right here on digital emunction: an emergency exit door. It’s up there on the right at the top of the page, just under the subscribe link. Use it early and often. Who knows? The brain you save could be your own…
If I knew how, I would ask forgiveness, but of whom? Of Aeore? The Sky? Myself?
Who else?
Are you afraid?
Not of death.
Of what?
Of that enormous sky.
You’re going to die.
Well, kill me then, says I.
You’re going to die then.
…
Well I said kill me then or else be quiet.
+++
(This photograph was taken by Gleison Miranda of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation [FUNAI] on a recent flyover of an uncontacted Indian tribe in the Brazilian state of Acre. The quotation is from Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord.)
Deep down I know—I simply know—that the American people love me. After all that I’ve done for them and given to them, how can they help but love me? And I know that it is only a very small percentage that have given up, who have lost faith.
Who said it? (Answer after the jump.)
A) George W. Bush
B) Hillary Clinton
C) Lyndon Johnson
D) Britney Spears
“Tastes Like Chicken”
The year is 1995, or thereabouts. Lunch is ending, we’re pulling into the parking lot of our high school, and the Grateful Dead are playing, as ever in those days, on the radio of my Bronco II. It’s “Sugar Magnolia”:
She’s got everything delightful
She’s got everything I need
Jimmy has a new girlfriend, and she’s a talker, one for whom the quantity of words are more important than the sense. For the sake of the song, and our sanity, we wait a moment before leaving the car and giving the lunch hour back to the gods.
Takes the wheel when I’m seeing double
Pays my ticket when I speed
“The Dead are so amazing,” the new girl says, gaining nods of agreement. “They always get it just right.” More nods. “Like that line, ‘Tastes like chicken when you’re on speed.’ It’s so true. Everything tastes like chicken on speed.”
No one nods now, nor do we look at each other, afraid (we tell ourselves) of laughing at her mistake, but also afraid (we do not admit) of how that flash of foreign knowledge had made our lives seem so small so fast.
(Photo: Trevor Paglen/New York Times)
In the words of its creator—er, redactor:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.
More here.
(via Joel Calahan)
Forget McCain, here’s the really promising story out of today’s NYT: “More Americans Are Giving Up Golf”
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