If you’re like me, you make a plan to go to sleep at a reasonable hour only to find that it’s 3:30 a.m. and you’re in bed reading articles on your phone, about topics ranging from racially motivated inequality to why writers like to stay hush about their sources of income, to Taylor Swift’s rumored lack of a belly button. Then you wake up, a few or many hours later, and don’t remember a single thing you read.
On average, I read about 20 articles a day, none of which I actively seek out on my own. My friend sends me an article on the cultural appropriation of ghee, and another link on that page leads me to another link on another page, and suddenly I am on a long essay about the history of the British East India Company, which leads me to an article on the history of jewelry trading, aka looting. On the subway I read books on my iPhone, and when I get service the plot of those books get mixed in with the plot of my life, so to speak. Was it Poirot who didn’t want to go to the dentist, or my friend Becky?
In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an article in the Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—that became famous enough to merit its own Wikipedia page—in which he argues that the abundance of information that the internet provides is diminishing our abilities to actually comprehend what we read.
