the onda

Nick Carr has a thought-provoking piece in the latest issue of the Atlantic which argues that how we read and consume content online is changing the way that we think. The staccato nature of reading online, scanning text and skipping from link to link, Carr argues, causes us to turn away from "deep reading" to a fast food equivalent— a grazing of content— that ultimately threatens our ability to think deeply on any particular matter. As he writes at the end of the piece:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

I worry less about the threat that all types of long form reading going away— it is far too seductive a means of escape for enough people not to stick around for a while— than I do about implication that we are jamming this new diet of content grazing in all facets of our lives. As content and communications blur together and our computers and devices encroach upon the previously empty white spaces of our daily routines, we may indeed be giving up a really valuable asset: the ability to think intensely and without distraction about particular issues which may not be what we are getting paid to think about.

Judging from the comments the piece has elicited, I imagine that quite a few people are beginning to feel this way, at least when it comes to our changing content consumption habits. I'm not ready to declare it a net-net bad thing, but it is worth remaining aware of the trend so that our ability to think doesn't suffer from a boiling frog dynamic (turn the temperature up slowly and the frog doesn't realize it is cooking alive).