"what the internet is doing to our brains, and to books"

[DorotheaPlenticlew]

Someone just sent me this link:

FT review of The Shallows

It was timely, because just this week I've been scolding myself for rarely settling down with a book these days when I can go online instead. I have a lot of lovely unread books lying around the house and I bought a few more this week. It's not just the demands of motherhood/life ... in the past I'd have fitted in considerably more reading "around the edges" than I do at present. Now, I tend to browse MN or eBay or FB or the Guardian ... etc etc ... while the books gather dust.

Well, that is a slight exaggeration; I do still get through a fair bit of addictive crime fiction -- it's the novels and interesting non-fiction that are ending up marginalized. Oh the shame. And in fact the irony, because I'd quite like to read this book but probably won't.

Two interesting excerpts from the review:

'The internet encourages distraction, interruption, dipping into one thing and sampling another. Through positive reinforcement and interactivity, the net, Carr says, ?turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment?. '

'Born in 1959, Carr straddles the book-dominated and web-dominated worlds and is at home in both. Members of his generation, he believes, have lived their lives as a ?two-act play,? consisting of an analogue youth and a digital adulthood. You could conclude that when the people educated after, say, 1990 die, there will be, in the strictest sense, no literary culture left to speak of. '

oh come on, is no one else interested/worried by this?! I find it quite troubling! Hate to think of the dcs struggling to enjoy books as older children/adults owing to brain plasticity and excessive iPad use

[disclaimer:we do not have an iPad in the house, I'm just thinking ahead to The Future]

I am interested! And have been thinking similar things recently - I used to read all the time, and now a book is something I rarely do. And I see the impacts at work - find it harder to concentrate on a single project and have a tendency to flip around and get distracted. I do blame the Internet but wonder if the benefits of it in terms of increased productivity in other ways don't balance that out to some extent?

I am interested too.

love the phrase "analogue youth and digital adulthood"

I tend to "waste time" on the computer but I still enjoy reading novels as a form of relaxation. Don't read much non fiction though . . maybe because I've got too used to bitesize bits of info.

You're right about work actually. Not working now but I was up until Christmas and yes, I found myself flipping/being distracted too. (And MNing at work ...)

Maybe you're right about the productivity/multi-tasking ability being beneficial. But still, the pleasure of getting really deeply drawn into a book is so great ... nothing else really makes up for losing that, right? And even if we are losing the habit a little, we can remind ourselves of how worthwhile it is and make the effort to read again. (That is what I plan to do now.)But for our DCs, the culture they're growing up in is so different, I wonder if they'll struggle to get the reading bug so deeply in the first place...

agree that is an excellent phrase!

Oh yes dorothea - I can't get my Ds to understand the great pleasure of sinking into a really great read when you are totally absorbed. One of life's great pleasures I think.

BUT. I have noticed that as I've got older, I can be totally absorbed in a book and then hardly be able to recall it a few months later. Is this a symptom of getting older or the butterfly mind that is a symptom of the digital age?

Vulgar - I have that problem too, but since childhood so in my case at least it's not the internet's fault!

WRT multi-tasking - I've heard about recent research that shows actually multi-tasking is not as great as you'd think - the time it takes, however short, to adjust between tasks (e.g. switching tabs on browser) makes it less efficient and it's much better to focus on one thing, finish it, then move on to the next one. Sorry I can't remember where I read it

But OP you are definitely not alone in this worry! I'm quite glad that DH is a bit of a technophobe, I'm hardly gadget/computer mad but I think he keeps me real IYSWIM?

We have a major beef with the fact that, e.g, my stepdaughters' maths homework is all done online. When they get research to do, they are explicitly told to look it up online. No mention of, erm, I dunno, a book?!? I'd like to be a primary teacher one day, and while I'm normally quite compliant, I would really struggle to fit in with the heavy emphasis on computers. Of course the technology is great and useful but I hate to think that my DCs will end up unwilling to use pen and paper!

This book looks interesting. I'm currently reading this which I think will include quite a lot on this topic.

Sorry about the long waffly post - hope you've got the attention span to read it

of course I have.

Just don't expect me to remember any of it!