My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works they propel you toward them.)įor me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. 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. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. 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. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. My mind isn’t going-so far as I can tell-but it’s changing. 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. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly.
Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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