I’ve been following Nicholas Carr’s thoughts and writing since I picked up The Big Switch a couple of years ago (I analyzed one particular section of the book here on Tropophilia). Shortly after that — right around when I was getting ready to move to California to join Google — Carr published the very controversial piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. Since then, he has been developing and expanding his theory that the Internet is rewiring our brains for the worse. He has just this month released the results in book form with The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.
Carr’s central argument is that with the increased use of the Web comes a decreased ability to engage in long-form reading and deep thought. Now, a while back, I blew up at another author who made similar claims without providing much, if any, causal evidence. I am happy to see from a few of Carr’s recent shorter pieces that he at least relies on published research to back his arguments.
Calls for “Delinkification”
Believe it or not, I’ve actually just committed what Carr deems to be one of the primary crimes perpetrated by the Web against deep reading and thinking: inline, contextual hyperlinking. He explains in a post (oops, I did it again!) on his blog:
The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.
Carr describes a multiplicity of reasons why the link distracts from long-form reading and comprehension:
- The link, by its very existence, makes us pause in our consideration and comprehension of the overlying and surrounding text to make a decision: do I click this, or do I ignore it?
- If we choose to click it, we are taken to a different page completely. Our brains must reset to prepare to capture and understand the new information. We lose focus on what we were on before.
- The problem can compound if the new page itself has links for us to decide on, and possibly follow further away from the original document.
Carr concludes that “people who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.”
In his blog post, Carr cites a few experiments in “bottom linking” that seek to mitigate this allegedly attention-degrading practice. It’s just what it sounds like: instead of linking within the text to other destinations on the web, one simply collects links at the bottom of the post. I’ve seen this from time to time, and I don’t like it for a few reasons.
I hesitate to even post on this, because I feel like I’ve written too many “does the dominance of computers spell the end of __________” entries over the life of this blog. But for whatever reason, when I was out riding my bike this weekend, this question came into my head: what is the future of writing? We’ve certainly talked about the future of 
Last Tuesday, my otherwise trusty MacBook sputtered out for the second time in six months. In February, I returned home to find my white plastic-encased sidekick unable to boot up. One new hard drive later, I was back in action (Apple’s awesome Time Machine utility saved me from any data loss). Unfortunately, I had to relive this scenario last week when my MacBook wouldn’t revive after a routine reboot. And so it was, after a painless call to AppleCare tech support, that I shipped my MacBook off to let the wizards work their magic on my poor, sick machine.
My birthday was last week, though I unfortunately had to spend the majority of the day taking an 
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