Has reading on the Internet reconfigured your brain? How about your attention span? Understanding? Patience? I’ve noticed that I can no longer plunge into a book or long article or essay without going through some sort of brain-shifting that might take as long as five minutes before I become acclimatized.
The process of analyzing an article or essay and becoming at ease with an author’s style and mannerisms takes me longer now than it did in the past. I blame it on the Internet.
First, there’s the sheer quantity of stuff that I’m interested in on the Net. Yes, I could shrink my habit but that’s just too frustrating. There are book blogs, political news sites, librarian bloggers, arts and culture, and food e-letters that are too good to pass up.
I find myself charging through these straining the gems from the dross like a whale sifting krill into it’s mouth. The pace is quick and things better jump out at me or I’m gone. This is nothing like reading the New York Times, New York Review of Books, or the New Yorker (yeah, I know, lots of NY – I’m not from NYC but I am of it). I spend much more qualitative time with these pubs although I don’t read everything in them. Hey, I’m selective.
I can slow things way down and take my time with print whereas I see my in-box filling with subscribed newsletters. I feel like I’m hacking through the jungle when I’m sitting in front of a computer. Don’t even mention RSS feeds. Everything is herky-jerky and I can’t concentrate on longer pieces that take some, well, you know…..thought.
That leads to my second point. Thought. Very few writers who cover print vs. on-line mention the word. They’ll write “critical analysis” or some other similar phrase but avoid think, thought, thinking, thoughtful, et al. Mark Morford’s article on the San Francisco Chronicle’s on-line version does use the word “thought” and he captures very well the “world of instant feedback and clickable everything” that life on the Net represents. When his MacBook crashed and he was thrown back into the world that existed before the WWW, Morford rediscovered the pleasures of slow time and reading books that were piling up around him.
Of course this interlude didn’t last long. His email and Net access were restored and he was “able to dive back into the digital maelstrom….” Morford did discover a very important lesson from this incident, however. The on-line world was still the same and things were rolling along (or not) without him. Will more of us “think” about how to live with less of the Internet and give some “thought” about the pleasures of reading? Real reading?
