"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" - Umm, probably...

I just finished reading Nicholas Carr's essay in The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", and the answer seems to be a resounding: YES!  He argues that what "the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," and that "the more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing."  This is frightening to me, as someone who tries to teach long and complicated novels to high school students.  We read Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye) and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury).  Well, I say read, because that's what I intend, but is that actually what my students are doing?  Are my expectations that they remain focused on a 300-page novel unrealistic in this day-and-age?  Perhaps.

Carr notes that modern media, like the New York Times, has had to adapt to today's readers who expect to skim and flit across snippets of information instead of diving deeply and immersing themselves in it.  I can attest that that's what my students would like to do, too, which is why I often make them keep dialectical journals as they read or evidence-interpretation charts that require them to track quotations and specific evidence from the text in their journal.  I don't know if that really helps them soak in and absorb the prose of the novel at hand, but I like to think it does a better job than SparkNotes.

I guess the bigger question, though, is the extent to which assigning long novels and requiring my students to read them is actually doing them a disservice with regard to preparing them for the future they'll likely face upon graduation.  Should we be reading more flash fiction?

Regardless, I tend to agree with Carr when he writes: "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. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with 'content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture."  And like Carr, that makes me worry.