Yes, the Internet is rotting your brain | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the Internet is rotting your brain

salon.com

31 pointsjseliger16 comments

It really depends on what you choose to read. When you read a good summary of a book coupled with insightful comments, you may gain better balanced perspectives than reading the whole book itself (which in a lot of cases just present one-sided arguments). Moreover, you might have spent only 1/10 of the time and will likely have a pretty good idea whether it's worth spending more time to read it in full.

A nice example is the Wikipedia article on the book 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' which presents an outline of its theory together with criticism and responses--the latter two cannot be found in the book itself. I read the whole 480-page book a few years ago and I currently remember less than the outline given in that single article. Yes, it was a fairly enjoyable reading experience, but comparing to all other opportunities and hobbies I could be doing, I would have saved the time by reading the Wikipedia article and other summaries & critics instead. Another book I regret reading in full is the 320-page 'Blink' which is well-summarized in a single article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28book%29.

To actually learn rather than having fun with prose and anecdotes, in the amount of time reading one book in full, you can instead explore a summary of ten books in interconnected areas and develop a more complete model of the field. If you pick good summaries and well-cited books (so that we can delve into conclusions without arguing too much about raw data), you can learn a whole lot more and in a more balanced way in the same amount of time. (Unless you are working on a dissertation in that field, too many details are simply unnecessary and could in fact interfere with analysis and understanding--as stated in the book 'Blink' above.)

"I read the whole 480-page book a few years ago and I currently remember less than the outline given in that single article."

It sounds like you're implying that the value of reading a book can be measured by how much of it you can consciously recall at some given instant after you've read it. But what if there's more to it than that? You also mention enjoyment of the experience of reading the book. But is there yet more?

I propose that reading a book can stimulate thought that a mere summary would not. Reading a book can generate ideas that a summary might not. Reading a book can change you in ways that a summary would not. Summaries also frequently omit critical details. Summaries are often biased, unfair, and inaccurate.

You may not remember much about a given book you've read, but that doesn't mean that the most you got from it was whatever enjoyment you had of reading it at the time.

Still others dared to argue that the value of what Carr calls "literary reading" has been inflated.

I find it amusing how dismissive he is of this idea. I personally highly value deep, literary reading.

But is it necessarily an inherent good for everyone. Many people prefer to take their entertainment in small chunks and may need the shallow knowledge of a wide variety of topics more than a deep understanding of any one area.

I am certainly not saying that it is overvalued, but I would not be dismissive of the idea and I could at least see arguments for it being inessential for certain types of people whose needs and desires lie in other areas.

...even the microseconds of decision-making attention demanded by hyperlinks saps cognitive power from the reading process...

This seems like a pretty good argument for hardcore minimalism in web design.

1.'What will we lose socially, politically, civilly, scientifically, psychologically, if a majority decides that the intellectual "shallows" are the proper habitat for the 21st-century mind?'

By comparing the high culture of a previous age to the average culture of a later one, you can always make an argument for a decadence. But what percentage of the population read Tolstoy in his day, even of the literate population?

2. Hyperlinks: Is one supposed to do deep reading without reference to anything other than the text? Does the handiest volume of Shakespeare on your shelves lack footnotes? Do you ever mark up page n of a book with a reference to page n minus m? Does that make you stupider?

All right, look.

Project Gutenberg + nook = reading bliss.

Snarf some epubs of your favorite authors, philosophers, etc. and have some rich brain food for your bus ride.

Compare and contrast this with Disconnecting Distraction: http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html .

Heh. I just read that article while procrastinating.

He's really spot on though. I don't have a good way to use my laptop on the other side of the room, but I could work in terminal mode, and only switch to my desktop for non-work.

As for the article about the internet killing our brains, I really disagree with a lot of it. I often find that one of the biggest problems of holding my attention is that the subject is simply not interesting.

Often, I'll read an article, even a very deep one, until I realize that it either has no substance, or I come across a big error that needs correcting.

I've read books that were over a thousand pages. Several which were about eight-hundred. The important thing about those books is that they were enjoyable.

The author seemed to dismiss readers who were anti-authoritarian, and anti-expert, regarding literature, as half-baked excuses for our lack of ability to read. This does not apply to me. I don't reject popular or expert approved books because the experts approve them, or because I am unable to read long books. I reject them because I can't force myself to read anything which is uninteresting.

Which I accept may be a problem, but if that is what the author was addressing, then it needs clarification.

You made me wonder how many people still work on terminal mode (having the GUI option). In case you're interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1335892

The other week my 4th or 5th - lost track - iPhone got wet and useless and it would've cost $200 to replace, so I finally got fed up with how expensive a habit it'd become and instead bought a $30 Nokia.

In the few weeks I've been using it, I've been amazed by how often I kick into "iPhone mode" whenever I have a moments pause while waiting in line or stopped in traffic.

Whether or not that's good or bad, I don't know, but I certainly remember 10 years ago being able to stand in line for a few minutes without jonesing for a hit of infotainment.

"... whenever I have a moments pause while waiting in line or stopped in traffic"

I've noticed this as well, and it really bothers me. I wonder why I can't sit through a stoplight without a distraction, and I realize it must not be a healthy thing that I've developed.

  iPhone got wet

An OtterBox (http://www.otterbox.com/) might help.

Nicholas Carr is excellent at being reductive -- that is, intentionally leaving out important facts in order to make a successful argument. He's pretty good at red herrings, too.

For instance: he wrote a whole book about why the day when you get an automatic advantage against your competitors because you're using technology is over. (And that, he strongly implies, is the whole point of technology: to get an advantage over competitors.) Red herring. That's not why businesses use technology; they use it so that they can do stuff they could never do before. No one orders MS Office because they think they're doing something their every competitor hasn't done.

He was being reductive when he wrote a book about why IT services will quickly become a commodity the way electrical service did. (The analogy does not fit; few people need "custom" electricity, but most business have special needs and will need something beyond standard installs of software.)

I'm willing to bet that he's using one or both of these tactics here, in order to get hackles up and sell books. I find it hard to take him seriously.

It turned out that a whole lot of people were just then realizing that, like Carr, they had lost their ability to fully concentrate on long, thoughtful written works. "I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do," Carr wrote.

Really? I'm probably better at reading long-form prose now than I've ever been. It's like saying if you spend some time as a sprinter that you will completely lose the ability to run long distances.

The latter sentence is actually true. It is a well known fact. That is why long distance runners make sure never to practice sprinting and sprinters as well as athletes that have to run short distances only (such as American football players) never run long distances during practice.

Anyways sorry for going off on an OT tangent. The internet must be rotting my brain.

Some runners do that. Others do not. My cousin is a D1 cc runner. He runs a lot of sprints in his training (mostly 400, 800m), but his shortest race distance is 10k. He is doing a marathon soon and an ironman is in the works.

Good football players often go jogging or do other continuous, light cardio for longer periods in general training.

It is sorta like how to be a good reader you need to be able to read/comprehend novels and academic articles -- imho.

Then I picked a bad analogy. It was already bad: reading is not a sport. The idea here: if you spend your time on the internet reading short-form, you'll become practically incapable of dealing with long-form prose. To which I say: bullshit, concocted to sell books.

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