Speculations on the future of reading

Shreeharsh Kelkar:

In 2008, Nicholas Carr published an essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled "Is Google making us stupid?" The article got a lot of play and was later turned into a book titled "The Shallows." At its heart, Carr's thesis is a simple one. He argues that the extensive internet reading - meaning the the copious amount of reading that we do on the internet as well as our need to be always "plugged in" into, for instance, email and Facebook - is changing the way we think. He is explicitly worried about the future of reading. He thinks that the art of reading deeply - think about being immersed in a novel for a few hours - is dying out; that, instead, reading has become a "sampling" activity: a little bit here, then a quick glance through email, another little bit there. Since reading did not come naturally to the human brain and in fact helped shaped the brain as we know it today, this new form of reading - all stops and starts - will change it as well. If that happens, will the decline of quiet contemplative deep reading result in the decline of deep thinking? (Obviously Carr poses this question rhetorically; his answer is an emphatic yes.)

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 3, 2011 4:52 AM
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