Imagethief has a good friend who wrote for the New York Times as a foreign correspondent for many years. This person (who shall remain gracefully anonymous) had three main complaints about his job: He was paid like a chump; his editors were idiots who didn't get the region he was reporting from; and the newspaper was steadily dialing the word count of its features down into oblivion in an attempt to compete with the Web.

This person, like many journalists who spend long hours writing at home and fending off --ahem-- obnoxious flacks, is a bit of a misanthrope. But his final complaint definitely rang true. That mainstream media should shift its distribution onto the Internet and reshape itself to take advantage of online delivery is a given. That it should dumb itself down in an attempt to compete with the brutally short-attention-span nature of much online media (hello, Twitter!) is at best debatable.

I like to read. I like to read long articles, long books and long blog posts. (I also like to write long blog posts, as some of you may have noticed.) I attribute such writing skills as I have to a lifelong love of reading and catholic (with a small "c") tastes. And I used to read the dictionary on the school bus, which probably explains the patchy nature of my elementary school social life. I find reading from print a fundamentally different aesthetic and intellectual experience than reading from an electronic device.

That's why I was interested to read in the (online) Atlantic Monthly an article from Nicholas Carr, author and heavyweight blogger, titled, "Is Google making us stupid?" Carr's article is not actually an attack on Google, but a general examination of how the intrinsic qualities of different media affect our cognitive abilities, and a specific examination of how the Web is now affecting us:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Imagethief is a big fan of the Internet. (And, ironically, I came upon this article through one of my many Google news alerts.) But I find that many of Carr's arguments ring true. It's not a Luddite rant. Have a read online. And then go read a book. A printed one.

Coincidentally, Imagethief had a (ahem) Twittered discussion about printed magazines with David Wolf and Paul Denlinger yesterday. I have two print subscriptions: The Economist and The New Yorker. It was a toss-up between the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. If I had time for a third print sub, it'd be Atlantic Monthly. But for the moment I'll continue reading it online. Like I said, I'm a big fan of the Internet.

Somewhat related:

The New York Times on the trouble with e-mail.

Cory Doctorow on "interruptive media".  Imagethief took some cues from this. For my work account I now automatically redirect all subscriptions and alert mails to a separate folder, and I've turned off all desktop alerts. Of course, I also use Twitter client Twhirl, which has desktop alerts, so I break slightly negative. Oh well.