#Is google making us stupid summary skin#

After all, it is not really their fault if, as he says, they have been “betrayed” by the mentors who should have taught them better. 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 “the dumbest generation” is, or isn’t. 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’t Trust Anyone Under 30. It is these poor cultural orphans, for whom “information retrieval” 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. He takes this insight to an even more alarming conclusion in the end, writing that “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” And if that’s the case for veteran readers, think how much worse it must be for the jeunesse dorée of the information age, if they never developed the habits that accompany “deep reading” in the first place. 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. Carr, but I have no doubt that I go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”Īlmost seems? I don’t know about Mr.

#Is google making us stupid summary skin#

The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Sound familiar? Describing, in The Atlantic Monthly, his own struggles to keep his attention span from contracting like the wild ass’s skin in Balzac’s novel, Nicholas Carr cites a British study of research habits among visitors to two serious scholarly websites which suggests a more general problem: that “users are not reading online in the traditional sense indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. 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. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.