Jul 30, 2008 01:00 PM
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San Francisco, 11:34 PM
Tue Feb 9
55 posts in the last 24 hours
Career crank Nicholas Carr's cover story for The Atlantic asks, "Is Google making us stupid?" Oh come on, Google chief Eric Schmidt told an AdAge-sponsored conference in New York. They said that about color TV forty years ago. You can watch Schmidt here, or you can pull up your pants and read Carr's 4,000-word feature. But more likely you'd prefer my 100-word excerpt:
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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