This is a scary concept as someone still has to be able to process the original information so that it can be formatted for the masses. An interesting analogy would be that of Jules Verne’s time machine: where the time traveler visits a post utopian society where technology has evolved so far that no one understands it anymore, and when it breaks they are incapable of fixing it. Will the internet limit humanity’s ability to consume knowledge? Is there a peak on ‘progress’ curve where a total dependence on underlying technologies will impede future innovations?

I identified with Carr’s article. I do feel that my attention span is shorter. I am more easily distracted. I do think that we lose something when people no longer wallow in books but spend their time frenetically surfing from here to there. However, I don’t know the answer to this problem. I see the benefits of the revolution we are undergoing as well and would not suggest that we move backwards. I thought several articles in that issue of the Atlantic all related to the theme of distractedness. That same week, I heard a radio interview of someone who had written a book about the need to increase children’s ability to be attentive.

This is one of the areas I spend a lot of time thinking about for work, so I won’t say much about that, but without denying the validity of the doomsday aspect of thinking about old media, decline in thinking, reading etc., let me try to point at some of the ‘brave new world’ aspects.

1. Meta-reading: We’ve never had the opportunity to rapidly course through vast amounts of information, guided by efficient associational links in left and right-brained ways. This is a new kind of thinking that may in some cases add more value than the opportunity cost of people not doing as much scuba-dive reading, to use Carr’s term. I’ve myself experienced moments of StumbleUpon epiphany as ideas come together suddenly due to the parade of related ‘jigsaw piece’ stimuli. Certainly not the use case the authors of the individual pieces intended (or appreciate), but value delivered nevertheless.

2. The 80-20 argument: A lot of end-to-end reading in the past was motivated by having little better to do. Much as authors like to think their every word is sparklingly original, it is actually possible to extract 80% of the value of most articles by cherrypicking 20% of the substance. It could be a different 80-20 for every reader.

3. A New Kind of Writing — the Buffet: You can recognize point 2 as a writer, and actively write to support that mode of cognition (it is harder to intentionally support meta-reading as a writer, but I have some ideas there too, for later). Make it easy for people to access your thinking, offered up in lego-block format.

4. The Art of the High Concept: One unambiguously good effect the Web has had , through its viral dynamics, is to cultivate in writers a fantastically sophisticated sense of design and efficient communication. Dan Pink really gets this (Whole New Mind, Johnny Bunko etc.)Ten years ago, this piece would have taken me 1000 pedantic words to articulate. Today, I’ve slowly learned the craft so I can have the same impact on my intended reader with a single graphic as stimulus. Maybe the sophisticated non-fiction comic book is the medium of the 21st century, and will add more value in 1 century than the novel did in 3? Who knows?

5. Better reactive/opportunistic thinking: Yes, perhaps our capacity for deliberative thought has diminished, but undeniably, our capacity for rapid reactive and opportunistic thought has increased.

6. Maybe information overload isn’t: The ‘attention economy’ framing is tired, and Herbert Simon possibly got it half-wrong. There are ways to think about attention that undermines the apparently axiomatic status of the ‘information overload’ assertion.

I remember 30 years ago wading through “Future Shock” and thinking that the entire book could have been condensed to 20 pages.

Now that the internet gives me an almost infinite number of alternatives, I have insufficient patience to read such a tome again. Is that an improvement?

Not for Mr. Toffler. But it works for me.

[...] and more specifically our collective reading skills. We’ve recently written about it here, here, here, and here, Nicholas Carr had a great piece published in the Atlantic Monthly called “Is [...]

[...] 11th, 2008, 02:41pm Nicholas Carr is a well-respected thought leader who we have agreed and disagreed with in the past (see here and here). A few weeks ago, he posted The Cloud’s Not So [...]