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\u2019d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That\u2019s 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\u2019m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.\u201d\u009d Sound familiar? Describing, in The Atlantic Monthly, his own struggles to keep his attention span from contracting like the wild ass\u2019s skin in Balzac\u2019s novel, Nicholas Carr cites a British study of research habits among visitors to two serious scholarly websites which suggests a more general problem: that \u201cusers are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of \u201d\u02dcreading\u2019 are emerging as users \u201d\u02dcpower browse\u2019 horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Almost seems? I don\u2019t know about Mr. Carr, but I have no doubt that I go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. The question is, how guilty do I need to feel about this? In his view, presumably, quite a lot guilty, since by reading online as much as I do I am depriving myself of the ability to read offline. He takes this insight to an even more alarming conclusion in the end, writing that \u201cas we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.\u201d\u009d And if that\u2019s the case for veteran readers, think how much worse it must be for the jeunesse dor\u00c3\u00a9e of the information age, if they never developed the habits that accompany \u201cdeep reading\u201d\u009d in the first place.
It is these poor cultural orphans, for whom \u201cinformation retrieval\u201d\u009d online is the only kind of reading they know, who are the main concern of Mark Bauerlein in his new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. One would think that a whole future in jeopardy would be too serious a matter for the flippancy of the rest of the subtitle: Or, Don\u2019t Trust Anyone Under 30. But Professor Bauerlein, who teaches English at Emory University and is a former director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, is not always sure just how much a matter of mirth \u201cthe dumbest generation\u201d\u009d is, or isn\u2019t. After all, it is not really their fault if, as he says, they have been \u201cbetrayed\u201d\u009d by the mentors who should have taught them better. Yet he seems to agree with Nicholas Carr that what we are witnessing is not just an educational breakdown but a deformation of the very idea of intelligence.<\/p>\n