How Carefully Are You Reading This?

A couple of months ago, assistant editor Nathaniel Peters linked to an article in the Atlantic which made the disturbing suggestion that what you are doing right now is making you stupider. Nathaniel didn’t think that he, at least, had suffered much:

Since coming to First Things, I’ve spent my days reading many more articles and blogs than I did in college. But I don’t sense any change in my thought patterns, although that may be because I learned how to think with the internet already in play. Instead, I’ve noticed that reading lots of articles online and in print every day has honed my ability to skim. It’s also taught me to save deep reading for what really interests me. But when a piece comes along that does grip me, I don’t perceive any greater difficulty in my ability to soak it in and mull it over.

Perhaps Mark Bauerlein, author of (deep breath): The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) would say that Nathaniel is at best a rare exception, and at worst a poor victim, too long immersed in this culture of electronic surfing to imagine that better is possible . Check out the review in the New Atlantis .