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How has the Web Altered Your Brain?
By Larry | June 30, 2008
That’s the question that I cull from an article by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic.
Carr writes that he becomes fidgety after reading a couple of book pages. He struggles to do the “deep reading” that once came naturally. He attributes this short attention span to the immediacy of the web and the rewiring of our neural connections that result from the way we read on the web.
Carr writes, “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.”
It’s this shaping of the process of thought that is changing us. I’ve experienced the same sort of struggle to read deeply and uninterruptedly. It’s a chore.
For Carr’s complete assessment see the full article. And by the way, it’s about four pages long in print, and it goes on forever online.
Topics: On Culture |
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