Thank goodness it's not just me

Remember when you were a kid and the grown-ups were always trying to drag you away from the TV and make you run around outside and play? They always said, "That thing will rot your brain and make you stupid". And they were right weren't they? A lot of people either don't have a TV now, don't watch the one they've got or are trying to cut back. The word is out about the TV and we're on to its little game of trying to make everyone into stupid and docile puppets of the state (or Big Business or whatever).

But has anyone else noticed that we have just traded one massive distraction for another?

Anyone care to guess what that distraction is? Here's a hint: How many times in the last month have you been up past midnight with the computer on your lap? Did you even notice?

Steve has posted something that I've been thinking for some time. The internet is doing something to our brains. Something bad. It's not merely a matter of the strange powers of the internet to suck time and put us into a kind of fugue state in which the room we are sitting in recedes into the mist. I once went to confession and said that I was guilty of wasting time on the internet and often found it very difficult to drag myself away, even to do things that I genuinely enjoyed or needed to do. The priest, whom I knew well and is a net-head himself, said, "It can be hypnotic, can't it?"

Are we being hypnotised? And if we are, what sort of suggestions are being put into our heads?

But it is not only this. Not only the attention span problem. Something about the net is altering the way I think.

It has been obvious to me for some time that the internet is doing something bad to my brain and I'm not the only one thinking it.

Steve links to an article in the Atlantic that discusses this. I am somewhat relieved because I had thought it was just me. Some kind of premature senility or perhaps some growing flaw in my personality that I have more or less given up reading deeply and with attention. That more and more of my time is taken up with the little square palantir and I find it increasingly difficult to turn it off and leave it off.

Steve writes:

The way we think has changed, and looking at it from this perspective I see it. I need constant mental stimulation or I am bored out of my mind. I am extremely impatient about getting results, whatever the task at hand. When I have a question about something, or want to know a name I can’t remember, I run to google. If I am at the store and can’t decide between two products, I stand there like an idiot, fire up my PDA internet connection, and start looking for reviews on my way-too-slow connection.

When I read blogs, if the posts are long, my eyes roll back in my head and I start spinning the scroll wheel. When I go to look at an encyclical or some scholarly document to back up a point I’m making, it’s all I can do to just get to the point and cut and paste. I can’t just read through something, I have to Ctrl+F search it for keywords, or use the word tabs on my Google toolbar.

Nicholas Carr, writing for the Atlantic, said,

"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.

Yep. Me too.

I use the internet for a living and I find myself doing exactly what he Atlantic article said we net-heads are increasingly doing. I don't read deeply or with attention; I scan and skim, pick out quick facts and quotes. These set off a series of connected facts in my head and I go to Google to find the related stuff and do the same again: scan and skim, pick and paste.

Mr. Carr again:

Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link...

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I've been thinking the internet is having a destructive effect on my thinking for some time. I have seen that my addiction to it has been very harmful to my spiritual life.

This morning, as I was having my little sit-down, the following struck me:

"But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"