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What is Internet’s Effect on Deep Reading?

Here’s a challenge: can you read this whole post without getting distracted? Can you resist
the urge to skim each paragraph for the “gist of it”, and instead read each sentence carefully,
reflecting on its meaning, even thinking about how it might apply to your life?

Chances are this might take some work: if you are accustomed to reading on the web, you’ve
likely also grown accustomed to the online reading style known as the “F-shaped pattern“,
where when you open a webpage, you read in an F-shape quickly from left to right across the
top, and then scan the middle until you get to the bottom, absorbing a few main ideas but not
truly engaging with any of them. It’s a quick and easy way to catch the major points, enabling
you to get an overview of everything presented, perhaps giving you the sense of
comprehension. But as the research shows, it’s likely that you are absorbing very little.

And when you’re websurfing, reading for entertainment, or perusing blogs, maybe it doesn’t
matter if you’re just skimming. But as the internet is increasingly the source for all our
content – the news we read, the research we do for work and school, the entertainment we
enjoy– we must ask the question: how is the internet changing the way we read, and the depth
with which we take in information? What are the implications for society if the deep,
reflective thinking associated with reading is replaced by the “web-page graze”?

In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” writer Nicholas Carr raised many of these
same questions. In it, he explored the idea that websurfing is restructuring the way we process
information, conditioning us to take in a lot of information at once, but not in much depth.
Carr opens his article talking about how he believes the internet has reprogrammed his
attention span:
“I’m not thinking the way I used to think,” he says. “I can feel it most strongly when
I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy. 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. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now, my
concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread,
begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward
brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a
struggle.”
He elaborates,
“…What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration
and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net
distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea
of words. Now I zip along the surface life a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Carr interviews a fellow writer who says this type of reading has generalized to reading books
as well:
“I can’t read War and Peace anymore” he says.” I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a
blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

I’ve noticed that many students report the same problem. After becoming accustomed to
reading quick bits of information online, it has become harder to stay focused on long reading
assignments that require sustained focus. Students are more and more foregoing reading long
articles and books and instead look for quick summaries on sites like Wikipedia and
Sparknotes– sites which allow them to get an overview of the content quickly, but don’t
require the same type of reflection and commitment that reading a book requires. If people,
and in particular, students, are reading less thoroughly and getting more “summarized
content”, how will this affect the type of thinking they engage in? What will be the impact of
online reading on the depth with which people immerse themselves in the subjects they are
reading about? […]

Is How We Read Important To Who We Are?

Sven Birkerts, in his essay, “The Owl Has Flown” (printed in the anthology Making Sense),
presciently addressed the internet’s potential impact on our intellectual ethic, and would likely
be worried for the fate of student scholarship in the age of online reading. Birkerts echoes
Carr’s observations about reading behavior, and then reflects more philosophically on the
implication that this type of reading style has for the virtues of depth and wisdom, believing
that reading online leads not only to a lack of depth in what we read, but a lack of depth we
cultivate as human beings:

The reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days…the reader
(now) tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next
without allowing the words to resonate inwardly. The inscription is light but it covers
vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality. The possibility of maximum focus is
undercut by the awareness of the unread texts that await. The result is that we know
countless more “bits” of information…(but) we know them without a stable sense of
context.
Instead of carrying on the ancient project of philosophy—attempting to discover the
“truth” of things—we direct our energies to managing information. The computer, our
high-speed, accessing, storing, and sorting tool, appears as a godsend. It increasingly
determines what kind of information we are willing to traffic in; if something cannot
be written in code and transmitted, it cannot be important.
(But in this paradigm) there is no chance that any piece of information can unfold its
potential significance… Where electronic impulse rules, and where the psyche is
conditioned to work with data, the experience of deep time is impossible. No deep
time, no resonance; no resonance, no wisdom.”

Carr states similar views in his article:

“The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not
just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual
vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by
the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for
that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies,
foster our own ideas. Deep reading…is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we
lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something
important not only in ourselves but in our culture.”

I think it’s interesting when Carr says, “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed
pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but
for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.” I wonder if material
garnered online– given the sheer amount of content, and the skimming-type reading style that
we often employ when reading it– resonates with the reader as much as content read in actual
books, magazines, and newspapers, and can set off those “intellectual vibrations” in the same
way reading a book does. Is there something about reading on a computer , constantly
distracted by advertisements, wanting to check e-mail, and the impulse to read other websites,
that keeps information from “unfolding its significance”, the way it can in a book?

Also, I think Carr is right that “deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking.” I
wonder, how is reading online affecting student scholarship? Are students becoming
conditioned to expect shorter, quicker versions of content, and losing the capacity to engage
in deeper thinking as a result? Is information being retrieved but not retained? If so, does this
support the idea that Birkerts puts forth that as a result of losing depth in reading, we are also
losing our capacity for deep thought as human beings?

Questions:
How has the internet changed the way you read? Do you find it more difficult to engage in
“deep reading” of long books and articles because you are accustomed to reading quick bits
of information and skimming for “overviews” online?
Do you agree with Birkerts and Carr that, as a result of being “information retrievers” on the
web, we will experience a loss of depth and wisdom as a society?