“The point of books is to combat loneliness,’’ David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,’’ David Lipsky’s recently published, booklength interview with him.
If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle , a dotted underline runs below the phrase. Amazon calls this new feature “popular highlights,’’ which allows other readers to highlight the passage on their Kindles.
Though the feature can be disabled by the user, “popular highlights” will no doubt alarm Nicholas Carr, whose new book, “The Shallows,” argues that the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our onscreen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.
With “popular highlights,” there will be a chorus of readers turning the pages along with us. Before long, we’ll probably be able to meet those fellow readers, share stories with them. Combating loneliness? David Foster Wallace saw only the half of it.
Mr. Carr’s argument is that these distractions come with a heavy cost, and his book’s publication coincides with articles that report on scientific studies showing how multitasking harms our concentration.
These studies are undoubtedly onto something, but they are meaningless as a cultural indicator without measuring what we gain from multitasking.
To his credit, Mr. Carr readily concedes this efficiency argument. His concern is what happens to high-level thinking when the culture migrates from the page to the screen.
Mr. Carr argues that the “linear, literary mind’’ that has been at “the center of art, science and society’’ threatens to become “yesterday’s mind,’’ with dire consequences. Here, too, I think the concerns are overstated.
Presumably, the first casualties of “shallow’’ thinking should have appeared on the front lines of the technology world, where the participants have spent the most time in the hyperconnected space of the screen.
And yet the sophistication and nuance of media commentary has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. The intellectual tools for assessing the media, once the province of academics and professional critics, are now far more accessible to the masses.
Yes, we are a little less focused today, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer longform narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.
We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.
STEVE JOHNSON
