I have definitely noticed the effect Nicholas Carr describes in his article in my reading behavior. I consume the majority of the content on the Internet. I read tweets, Facebook posts, news and scientific articles, pdfs and audio books. I do notice I often find it difficult to concentrate on a single piece of writing, especially if I don’t find the text all that interesting. However, I’d like to think it’s not because my deep reading skills have completely atrophied. There are still some texts - from short articles to 700 page books - that I find captivating. When reading them, I unconsciously ignore the notification panels popping up on my screen, only to realize after an hour that I had three urgent emails come in. However, I don’t come across such texts that often. Most of the time, I skim through the first few paragraphs and ‘evaluate’ the article to decide if it’s worth concentrating on.

While the shift is definitely happening, I don’t completely agree with the assertion in the article. Google isn’t making us stupid - we’re adapting to a world of information abundance. In the past, if you had a good book in front of you, you would read it because there wouldn’t be many alternatives of things to read - or if there were, they wouldn’t be popping up every few minutes. In the age of the Internet, there are hundreds of ways for a person to discover new content: friends emailing you links, tagging you in a Facebook post, tweeting links to articles, content aggregation platforms filtering the texts and using machine learning to suggest content you would like. Every time you’re committing to reading an essay, article or a book, you’re saying “no” to thousands of other texts which can be more interesting and otherwise valuable than the one you chose. There simply isn’t enough time to practice deep reading on every piece of content you find on the Internet - you need to prioritize. And while there is no doubt that this makes our deep reading skills worse - after all, we’re using them less - it improves our comparison and estimation skills and makes it easier for us to see connections between various pieces of knowledge. And even if deep learning is somehow unique in creating deep thoughts, I don’t see an alternative. Either you need to completely trust someone to curate your content, or you have to “waste” time skimming and comparing. There is no other choice.