The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

It’s interesting how some of these posts take shape. I’ve been meaning to write about the cover story of this month’s issue of The Atlantic—‘Is Google Making Us Stoopid?’—since it came out, but I didn’t know what to actually say about it until now.

John sent me a link to the Guardian’s books blog about American slowness when it comes to novel-writing and -reading. (This is good news for me, since I’m going on 6 years for Lithium.)

This blog post in turn sent me over to Slate’s How We Read Online, which was just plain disconcerting.

The gist of all this is that the Internet has changed the way we humans read and, more importantly, think. Or so they believe. No formal studies have been done. When I think about my own experience, it seems somewhat true. I used to spend hours at a stretch sprawled on the couch or on my bedroom floor reading novels and comic books. These days, I spend hours at a stretch reading on the Web, and I read novels in short little spurts. My reading habits have clearly changed.

The problem is that many other things in my life have changed, too. A major reason for the amount of time I spend online is that I’m a writer. I need to stay current, and I need to do a lot of research. The Web has been around since 1993, and I’ve been ‘wired’ since 1996. But it’s only in the past year or so that I’ve spent so much of my days staring at a screen.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t sit down and read a book. Barring distraction, I can still sit for an hour or more with a book. I can still think.

I think the problem with the Internet, specifically the Web, is not that it’s rewiring our brains, it’s that it’s the Internet: it’s all connected. There is infinite content, infinite fulfillment.

If you can find it