[See terse, prior comment on haystack]
Carr is not the only one who finds that they appear to be loosing some memory etc. as a result of using Google as a memory substitute. They also find that they are reading less. That is not my experience, but life would not be life if we all had the same experience.
However, I think they have a pretty narrow set of concerns.
Google is not the issue. [There are plenty of reasons to worry about Google, but spreading illiteracy is not one of them.] The issue is the net, the web and expanding modes of human communication.
- Carr and his friends may be reading less, but others are reading much more. Others? A pretty diverse group Here are two examples: I read more because its easier to find things that interest me, things I find valuable because I have more powerful search tools than a coffee shop and a library card index. Others, in rural Peru, for example, read more because while their village did not have books in the past, now, thanks to OLPC and the net, the village has on line libraries, access to news papers, blogs, etc.
- Reading is only one, and not the best, form of human communication. Music and images have much more to offer and both are undergoing an explosion of production and use. Carr may find You Tube too low brow. Fine. All the educated people thought Dante was too low-brow too.
- A bit of perspective is useful. The written word devalued traditional skills -- especially oral memorization. Those skills gave special rights to a small number of people with the unusual innate ability to handle the rhyme and volume as well as access to the holders of the tales. And yes it may be true that Carr is reading less. [Perhaps even writing less;-) ]But I can find Lynne d Johnson and Salt-n-Pepa.
Thanks to the web and technology like Google's more people can produce more content in more formats than ever before. And, more people can find it.
I'm so sorry that this does not work out for the editors of Atlantic, but I'll get over it.
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