Many years ago, I came across Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”Carr muses about his inability to concentrate and focus. My instant response was recognition. Upon reading an article that was created to explore the harsh truth, I was skipping around, skimming, pulling out phrases. I actually had to force myself to read and process all of it and this is a common experience. I read everything like I read a wikipedia page- I am skimming for bits of information. I am unable to focus on the entire content most of the time.

This is our culture: rapid, stock full of information… yet, void. Just purely at an anecdotal level, I think we can all agree that as a society we seem to have difficulty concentrating and focusing on tasks for long periods of time. Now if we introduce the element of technology, the image begins to make a bit more sense. The rapidity with which smart phones, tablets and computers provide information ameliorates any need to concentrate for long sustained periods of time. We just “search”, “receive” and “learn.”

Media Theorist Marshal McLuhan suggests that the media in our lives is no only distributing this information to us, but also “shaping the process of thought.” Carr develops on this, noting that the mind has started to accept information as it is presented by the Internet. Let’s break this down further:

Say you don’t know what the average height of women in the United States is. Rather than going to the library and searching through various manuals and statistics like we would have needed to in the past, we can now open our phones and search. The results are presented to us in under a minute and just like that we have gained a new piece of knowledge.

If there has ever been a time to say that we have progressed from being hunters and gatherers, that time is now.

The brain is a malleable organ. It is no secret that each experience and thought that we process imprints on our brain at some level. It is also no secret that each time we have a thought, we are drawing up on our previous knowledge. So, if the brain is malleable, what happens when we are changing the way that we process information? Are we changing it longterm? And what are the ramifications of this? Do you think that if we took a human brain from 50 years ago and one from today, there would be distinct physiological differences? I don’t think so, but I do think that if we were to look at fMRI scans of adults and children whose brains developed with the Internet, there would be differences in where processing occurs. (However, the capability to actually run such an experiment would be near impossible because of all of the differences in variability between brains, themselves.)

On the note of processing and our newfound inability to concentrate, Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist, writes that “we are not only what we read”, but also “we are how we read.” Carr responds by saying “my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”

So this is why we have a harder time concentrating. Is this just a part of a new age, or should we be fighting against it? Why should we have so much information at our fingertips- hundreds and hundreds of pages of articles- when we cannot focus long enough to completely read them?

It is quite ironic.