Writing in the July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr explores the possible impacts that reliance on the Internet is having on our brains in a piece entitled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
"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," Carr wrote. "My mind isn't going — so far as I can tell — but it's changing."
According to Carr, this awareness of shifting thought patterns is most noticeable when he is reading — especially if it's a longer, more in-depth piece.
"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," Carr said. "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."
Carr cited media theorist Marshall McLuhan's observation that rather than passive channels of information, media not only supplies the stuff of thought, but also shapes the process of thought.
"My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles," Carr said. "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
Apparently, he's not alone.
While long-term neurological and psychological experiments are still underway, Carr says that scholars from London's University College have noticed a major change in the way people read and think; conducting a five-year research program which found readers exhibit "a form of skimming activity," bouncing from source to source and then rarely revisiting them later — even if they bookmarked it for future reference.
"It is clear 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," Carr said. "It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."
For operators in the online adult entertainment space, the message is clear: consumers are seeking information in increasingly smaller and "quicker" bites — and if you can't "sell" them on your offer the first time they see it, you may not get a second chance.
