PS on Information Overload

As a PS to my yesterday's post on Information Overload, its dangers, and the question whether we might be making a mistake that we won't be able to correct, here is a brilliant article by Nicholas Carr in the recent Atlantic issue

Is Google Making Us Stupid?
What the Internet is doing to our brains

[...]

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. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

If you read one article today, read this one.

Posted by Anonymous

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