No Man’s Blog

“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”.

Wow. I can’t remember when was the last time I’ve read something that resonated so strongly with my personal experience. I was reading these lines and my heart started going faster and faster… yes! thats exactly how i feel! I’m not alone in my increasingly severe ADD!

In this thoughts provoking article, Nicholas Carr goes on to recall Marshall McLuhan brilliant observation that media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

Luckily I can still get lost and immerse myself in a good fiction. But I find it difficult to consume non-fiction literature whether business or scientific books. The web’s way of reading somehow killed my ability to concentrate and delve deeper into something. The frantic browsing, scanning and skimming of information on the web - articles, blog posts, links, videos and feeds - all with constant interruptions have indeed alter my way of thinking for the worse.

But there’s a bit of conspiracy theory tone in the article that i find hard to accept:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

It’s an interesting point but I’m not sure I buy into that. It’s not (just) google that making us stupid. For me it’s the great paradox of abundance of information beautifully epitomise in ‘drinking from the media firehose’ metaphor that alter our minds and the way we read and think.

It’s the combination of (1) the extreme abundance of content that generated constant minor anxiety that we’re missing something, (2) the RSS culture that made it so easy to become feed-junkies and generated the scanning, skimming and hopping patterns of our excessive, yet shallow reading and (3) de.licio.us that gives us the illusion that ‘you know what you store’ or that if you park a half-read article you will come back to it later when you have the time or when you ‘really’ need it.

But if I’m honest with myself, my de.licio.us is just a massive bin for half-read information that I’ll never actually read or get back to because I’m too busy skimming through and saving other stuff…

We need better discipline and more tools to help us switch off and restore our ability to concentrate, contemplate and process information. It’s easy to blame google but at the end of the day, it’s us feed-narcotics that add 5 more feeds to our RSS reader everyday. It’s us neurotically checking our emails every 2min. It’s us skimming and hopping from one link to the other repressing the fact that the process of real learning diminished.

I strongly resist any kind of Andrew-Keenian doomsayers rhetoric. The web is us and what we do with it. And I strongly believe that the blessings to the human society and culture are by far greater than the dumbing down of individuals. Just as books and Rock ‘n’ Roll and TV in the past, google and the web do not make us stupid as a society.

But we surely need to find better ways to deal with that abundance of content/information. So far we invented productivity tools like RSS readers to help us handle massive amounts of information, which might be effective on one level but are totally ineffective on another. We now need tools to help us realise we don’t really need 500 feeds…or tools that will scans the 500 feeds for us and automatically delete/reduce the overlaps and redundant chatter.

But no such tools better than ourselves to know our limits and what good or bad for us, so at the end of the day it’s really us and our self discipline that will have to overcome that childish anxiety that we’re always missing on something. We will have to learn to curb our obsession with feeds and to re-learn our mental and intellectual boundaries.

nuf said

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