Reading has been supplanted, as Carr puts it, by “the speedy, superficial skimming of information” culled from the links generated by a Google search, which discourages “any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative.” Whereas once we nurtured our private selves by communing with literature, now we have only a “library of snippets.”
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You may be sipping a Starbucks latte in your chinos, but clicking on those top links, your sense of what is important conforms to collective norms as surely as if you were wearing a gray flannel suit to your corporate office. Indeed, you might be better off at the mercy of IBM or General Motors, because at least then you could see the disturbing truth lurking under the “idealization of maximum connectedness”: that with every Google search or friend request or tweet or stolen look at your BlackBerry, you are that much more firmly plugged into the collective and that much less in touch with yourself.
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Carr offers a quick tour of the labs where MRI-aided scientists have been peering into human brains to observe this rewiring, and the news is not good. A UCLA professor claims that daily use of digital devices “stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release.” Another UCLA scientist reports that our “working memory” isn’t designed to multitask, and that as a result “learning facts and concepts will be worse if you learn them while you’re distracted.” A Swedish neuroscientist has found that when our brain is overtaxed by all that information, we find “distractions more distracting,” and a team at the University of Southern California warns, in Carr’s words, that “the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience empathy, compassion, and other emotions.” A University of Wisconsin neuroscientist, one of the first to discover the plasticity of the adult brain, looks at the big picture and acknowledges that online tools may be indispensable but concludes, in the same capital letters the surgeon general requires on cigarette pack health warnings, that “their heavy use has neurological consequences.” The problem with the Internet is not philosophical but scientific, says Carr, which means it’s not only a matter of our intellectual lives, of the significance of depth or the necessity of self-exploration, or anything else debatable, but of our physical health. It’s a medical, not a moral, concern.