Changing Reading Habits?

I just read an interesting piece from the latest Atlantic Monthly, entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? The author, Nicholas Carr, observes that he and colleagues have all noticed a change in their reading habits — an inability to concentrate or focus when reading texts longer than a page or two. I’ve noticed this myself — I’ve become far more distractible when reading, especially when reading online, where I may link from article to article without ever finishing one. Or I may skip one entirely, dismissing it as “too long,” if it involves more than one full scrolling of the screen. When and how did this happen? Since when is a two-page article “too long”? It bothers me that I find it so difficult to sit down and pay attention to a book for any length of time these days (unless it’s a really compelling book, and I do still find some of those around, luckily) — I’m a librarian, after all! 🙂 Have others noticed this phenomenon? Does it bother you, and if so, have you found ways to overcome it? (And if it doesn’t bother you, why not?)

6 thoughts on “Changing Reading Habits?”

  1. I’ve absolutely noticed that I have a shorter attention span. I’m no entirely sure what to blame it on.

    I actually just finished Francine Prose’s book on mindful reading, which has inspired me to slow down. So I’ve been trying to be more conscious about developing different modes of reading: scanning the Metro vs. absorbing important, new information.

  2. @Karen: yes, I did read the whole (long) Atlantic article. But when I first got to it, I scrolled through and thought “wow, long!” and almost passed it by. But the subject of the article actually made me decide to consciously stick with it, beginning to end, without being distracted by anything else. But that approach definitely contradicted my instincts.

  3. It did take me awhile to read Carr’s article. I think that reading so much (and so many much shorter pieces) online, has had an impact on me. I do feel like over time I’m having an increasingly hard time staying absorbed in a longer book. However, I have still read (and really enjoyed) some longer articles online. (Though the other day, I did scroll down to see the page count on one, and just decided to skip it.) While I’ve read some very short, pithy and enjoyable blog posts that I still remember, I feel a greater sense of satisfaction with longer pieces—that the writer is trying to build towards something—and that I’ll actually learn (or feel) something substantive. Reading Richard Foreman’s example of the “Cathedral,” reminded me of a class I took on rhetoric, where our instructor talked about how eighteenth century students (and earlier) would memorize information by categorizing it into a “mental house of rooms,” whereby each new fact and detail within a certain room category (like the bones of a mouse’s foot in Anatomy) would be added like a knickknack or piece of furniture to the room. I was really taken with this model and thought how incredible it would be to have trained my mind like that.

  4. G. Karen Merguerian

    It is so interesting how a society can gain or lose some kind of brain function when it’s devalued. It used to be thought that it was impossible for people to memorize epics as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey, but Milman Parry and other anthropologists in the 30’s found some bards in Yugoslavia who were able to do it using mnemonic devices like the “memory palace” technique that Emily describes, plus rhymes and formulas and so on. The key is that they learned in an environment where oral skills were valued, i.e. in communities that were basically illiterate. Once literacy becomes widespread, the skill is gradually lost.

    (I’ve always suspected that’s why little kids can remember and recite so well, the stakes are high because if they forget they can’t look up and read what they forgot. Once they learn to read they don’t memorize automatically, nor with the same ease.)

    So is the internet is the next stage in the loss of memory? Once you know everything is stored in Wikipedia etc, and you don’t have to find the dictionary or the instructions, your ability to retain information fades from lack of use. Of course it’s progress because it distributes information so widely, but just like with the advent of printing and literacy, we sacrifice more of our ability to retain, even over the course of a single session of book reading.

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