I bought last month’s Atlantic magazine while I was wasting some time in the airport a few weeks ago. The cover caught my attention: Is Google Making us Stoopid?

I read through the article and couldn’t help sympathizing with the author, Nicholas Carr, who is experiencing weaker and weaker concentration and finding that he can’t read more than 3 paragraphs of anything anymore without being overwhelmingly distracted, wanting to jump to the next thing. Of course, he contends, this epidemic of distraction (can anyone say Attention-Deficit Syndrome?) plaguing our modern world is partly due to the distraction-friendly behavior that the Web induces. “Hyper”-linking, after all, is the very nature of the web.

As of now, all of this is just anecdotal. No scientific studies are confirming our decrease in intellect. Friends are asking each other “Hey is it harder for you to stay focused on single piece of writing for any length of time.” Friends are sharing their experiences.

Carr says,

“Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. ‘I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,’ he wrote. ‘What happened?’ He speculates on the answer: ‘What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?’”

It’s not new to understand the relationship between human thought/behavior and technology. The two are linked. The way that humans processed information prior to the printing press was very different than after the widespread dissemination of the printed word.

Today, I caught myself in the act of surfing the web. Mid-stream I spontaneously thought, “This would be a great example of our HYPER-linking behavior.” What does it look like? Here’s only about 15 minutes of my day:

• Scanning nytimes.com
• Article entitled “Advertising: Woman to Woman, Online” catches my eye
• Intrigued by the title and the relevance to my work in online marketing, I read the first 3 paragraphs of the article. The journalist begins by describing Dooce, a blog created by Heather Armstrong, who eventually could quit her day job because marketers began paying her to advertise there.
• Curious, I stop reading the nytimes article and skip over to Dooce.com
• Check out Daily Photo, Daily Chuck, and the FAQs
• Read the HA-larious “About this Site” section (which I read in full, mind you)
• Then look at a section called Mastheads, which are banner-esque monthly musings of language and design by Armstrong.
• This led me to google “A Pacific Ocean of Crap”, which happens to be Armstrong’s August masthead. (And the design for which looks uncannily like the new United Airlines television campaign. If you haven’t seen it, you must not be watching the Olympics.)
• In googling “A Pacific Ocean of Crap”, I see in the results an article called, “Our Oceans are Turning into Plastic…are we”
• After reading about 4-5 paragraphs, when I couldn’t find the answer to the title question, I scanned through the article. There was a nice graph that helped me a bit and big caption that read, “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contribuing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world.”
• Becoming disheartened with this topic, I used the back button (twice) to get back to the funny and irreverent Dooce.com

At this point, I stop dead in my tracks. Nicholas Carr was correct. We don’t read anything longer than a few lines anymore. Are you still reading this blog???? Congratulations.

In the Atlantic magazine article Richard Foreman, a modern playwright who is documenting his own cognitive and intellectual changes as information becomes ubiquitous, says “[As we are drained of our] inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, we risk turning into ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Which leads me to the last click (the Back button) in my 15 minutes of surfing the web, “Pull a chair up with the hyrup”, Amstrong’s latest blog post on Dooce.com, which describes how she can’t serve her daughter pancakes because she doesn’t know how to make them. This blog post includes a funny youtube video about making pancakes, which I spent a good 3 minutes watching.

I think I’m stoopider than I was 15 minutes ago.