Maria Popova's Biographical Mélange Falls Short

A decade ago, lots of people worried that the internet was ruining their brains. In 2008, Nicholas Carr published an essay in the Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—a question that pretty much answered itself. Carr felt sure that his increasing inability to concentrate, to immerse himself in a book or even a long article, had to be the result of his cognitive functions having been rewired by the web, making him hopelessly distractible. The counterargument to Carr's theory, voiced by the usual gang of get-with-it-Grampa tech-positive pundits, held that every new communications technology is greeted by some form of panic and that if the internet fosters a skittering, browsing form of reading, well, maybe that's what's required in the brave new world we have created. At the time, blogger John Batelle wrote that when he was “jumping from link to link, reading deeply in one moment, skimming hundreds of links the next” and “devouring new connections as quickly as Google and the Web can serve them up,” he was “performing bricolage in real time” and getting “a lot smarter.” Besides, the internet has made more information, and therefore more knowledge, accessible to more people. And how could that be wrong?