Pumping iron, or is the Internet dulling our senses?

"Is Google making us stupid?" asks Nicholas Carr in the July / August issue of The Atlantic. Assuming the Internet hasn't completely eroded your attention span, his article is well worth a read.

Though I'd maybe rephrase his question slightly to "Is Google (or the Internet) dulling our senses?'

According to Nicholas Carr, "The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes."

But that's not without cost. Technology also has an impact on our mental processes. When Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter in 1882, one of his friends noticed a change in his style "from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

Similarly when the printing press was invented in the 15th century, there were fears that people would become intellectually lazy.

Fast forward to today, and a University College London study cited in the feature looked at how people access computer research sites.

Goodbye books, hello power browsing

Instead of methodically going through each piece of research, readers would "“power browse” 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."

Nicholas Carr's article has anecdotal examples of people ditching books once they start reading online, but it's something that was backed up by a study earlier this year. The Digital Entertainment Survey in March showed that 14% of people who use social media read fewer books.

According to Ofcom (like the FCC in the US), 39% of the UK Internet population (40 million) uses social networks, which means thanks to the Web, 2.2 million of us in Britain read less or not at all.

So pardoxically, have the same Internet factors that make writers' lives easier - the here and now availability of information - led to less people reading their work?

The democratisation of the written word through the printing press and now the Internet has empowered people the world over, but did the anti Gutenberg people in the Middle Ages get one thing right? Has its currency become devalued, and we no longer treat it with the same respect?

Think about it on the most mundane level. Once it would have been the height of bad manners not to read every word of a hand written letter. Yet every day we "power browse" emails from people we know, or ignore them altogether.

Talking to myself

With the Internet being integral to my job, all this resonates with me personally.

Not long into my career in 1995, my then agency director sent me to the British Library to - gasp! - actually borrow, read and photo-copy reports that were needed for a forthcoming new business pitch.

Would I have the patience today to while away a full afternoon in a library (what's that?) flicking through a huge tome, marking key pages, and dragging it over to the copier? I kind of doubt it.

And though I spend hours in my local Books etc, the vast majority of what I buy remains unread. That's largely because my traditional book time, my way to and from work, has been replaced by me scanning through the 112 blog and news feeds (I've just counted them for the first time, to my astonishment) on my personal netvibes page.

Meanwhile, having already bashed out several hundred words of copy, I've recently wondered whether these long commentaries aren't somewhat self indulgent.

Wouldn't the odd paragraph here and there with relevant web links be much more useful to readers who by and large look at this at their desks and similarly have a stack of other web sources to go through? By this stage have a post, hasn't everyone zoned out, leaving me talking to myself?

Like steroids for the mind

Exposure to 112 sources in addition to whatever I stumble across informally online, see on telly, hear on the radio and read in print....the total must be around the 200 mark.

That's not information consumption, it's a full scale bombardment! A gatling gun 'rat a tat tat' of news, features, commentaries, graphs, stats, trends and celebrity gossip.

No wonder colleagues and friends have in the past joked about my ability to absorb and digest vast quantities of sometimes random stuff!

And there's millions of you out there just like me. We're the people my University class mate Carl Honore makes a living writing about. We're the anti Eckhart Tolles.

A quiet mind? Eckhart, those minds you talk to Oprah about are on Internet steroids. Packed full of the thousands of facts they've taken in during the day.

They're pumping iron!

Is more really less?

Last month I wrote about Dutch designer and copywriter Martijn van Osch who for six months cut down his media consumption to one news website, recorded TV documentaries and two magazine subscriptions.

Like me, Martijn works in the creative industries where it's a given that absorbing a lot of information helps you with your work.

Martijn's conclusions suggest that the opposite is sometimes true. Having to rely on your own senses, the company of yourself and that of other people, can actually boost creativity.

Among the five lessons he learned, two involved having a more positive outlook thanks to no longer hearing a constant drum-beat of bad news. He experienced more in his day to day life, and had to find constructive ways to fill the two and a half hours extra every day that were suddenly at his disposal.

While not suggesting that the media is a bad thing, he wanted to raise awareness, "so more people will start to regain control of (a part of) their life and start creating / doing whatever they think will really add value to their and others’ lives."

And though I can't imagine myself strolling down to the library with pen and paper any time soon, it does beg the question:

Was he any less informed or rounded by looking at 3 pieces of media, than by looking at 200+? While we might know more, by not being able to digest properly what we take on, do many of us information junkies in fact understand less?

Photos (Flickr / Creative Commons) - Will Lion and Mike Licht