"For someone who had got through life on raw brainpower, this was unsustainable, and a little terrifying."Ĭarr, like any number of technology sceptics, would probably have advised Pang to take a break: to disconnect from the internet and head for the mountains to declare a gadget-free "digital sabbath" one day a week to get rid of his smartphone or never check email at night. "I would go into a room to get something, and by the time I got there I'd forget what I was looking for," says Alex Pang, a Stanford University technologist who'd barely turned 40 when he began to feel that life online was melting his brain. Yet that gnawing sense of mind-atrophy that Carr identified hasn't gone away, and just recently in Silicon Valley it's stopped being taboo to admit it. Yes, the internet is "changing our brains", but then so does everything – and, contrary to the claims of one especially panicky Newsweek cover story, it certainly isn't "driving us mad". No, the web probably isn't addictive in the sense that nicotine or heroin are no, Facebook and Twitter aren't guilty of "killing conversation" or corroding real-life friendship or making children autistic. In the half-decade since Carr's essay appeared, we've endured countless scare stories about the life-destroying effects of the internet, and by and large they've been debunked.
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But now "I zip along the surface like a guy on a jetski." I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." Reading, he recalled, used to feel like scuba diving in a sea of words.
Increasingly, he'd sit down with a book, but then find himself unable to focus for more than two or three pages: "I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. "I'm not thinking the way I used to think," he wrote. Back in the summer of 2008 – a long time ago, in internet terms, two years before Instagram, and around the time of Twitter's second birthday – the US writer Nicholas Carr published a now famous essay in the Atlantic magazine entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? The more time he spent online, Carr reported, the more he experienced the sensation that something was eating away at his brain.
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