too many Daves

I e-mailed my favorite blogger last night. Today he excerpted my e-mail on his blog. I’m grateful.

As it stands, my words are attributed to “a reader.” It’s an accurate description, but I can’t stay true to my own standards unless I sign my name to my e-mailed critique of “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains,” Nicholas Carr’s piece in the current Wired. If I keep my name off the critique, I will need to stop griping about the sucker punches people throw from the shadows of online anonymity. I like that high horse and I’m unwilling to dismount.

So I’ll post my full e-mail here. As you’ll see, the e-mail refers to “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble,” the title of the post that brought Carr’s article to my attention and prompted last night’s e-mail. The post’s title came from an image Carr used in Wired: “Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory.”

Here, without any further throat-clearing, is last night’s e-mail …

Dear Andrew:

I’m writing because I found “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble” to be almost entirely unpersuasive. It just struck me, though, that there’s something I should do before I dissect Nicholas Carr’s claims: retrace my steps, tell you how I got here. I’ll do this because my accidental, unpremeditated path feels meaningfully different from the “watching the landscape from a train” experience you described.

This started with my wife sending me an e-mail with an uncapitalized “sullivan” in the subject line. In the body of the e-mail, she pasted your Ralph-the-pig-themed “Emails of the Day.” Reading those, I saw the words “pig nipples” in hypertext. Now, I’m not a prude, but I haven’t ever clicked the words “pig nipples” before. Tonight I did. Why? My best guess is that many of those futile, little thimbles that I’ve splashed into the bathtub of my mind have been infused with this basic idea: “Dear Bathtub: We got these ideas from Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan posts worthwhile stuff. He uses links sparingly and intelligently. We can’t click all links. But Sullivan’s links tend to be worthwhile. Remember this. Yours sincerely, Thimble.”

And so I clicked “pig nipples.” This launched my browser, pulled up “The Sexually Ambiguous, Swimming Pig, Ctd” post, and gave me the pleasure of learning the expression “worthless as teats on a boar hog.” In fairness to Nicholas Carr, I can’t be sure that I will remember that expression two months from now. But I’m OK with that. Truly.

Having finished reading the “teats on a boar hog” post, my eyes drifted toward the right of the screen. I saw your picture. My gaze drifted further right to Megan McArdle’s picture. I thought of my friend Aaron, a doctor with keen ideas on healthcare reform who has been unimpressed by some of McArdle’s work. Right or wrong, the thought of Aaron pulled my eyes away from McArdle and back to you. Under your photo, I saw the cryptically truncated words “Filling A Bathtub With A…” With the interrupting ellipses, those five words were even less promising than “pig nipples.” But I clicked anyway, read through your “Filling A Bathtub With A Thimble” post, and emerged feeling skeptical. Remembering Thimble’s note, Bathtub reminded me that you use links sparingly and intelligently and that I could delve deeper into Carr’s ideas by clicking the link in your post. So I clicked.

As I clicked, I was distracted — not by pop-up ads or by a surfeit of hypertext but by hearing my spaniel pad past. This reminded me that I’d already broken my promise to take the dogs straight out five minutes earlier. When made to wait, our dogs sometimes pee inside. I eyed the spaniel, confirmed that he was settling in for a nap instead of sniffing around for a peeing spot, and started to read Carr’s piece. By the end of the first paragraph, I was completely distracted — not by Twitter, not by incoming e-mail, not by the peril of canine piss but by a flaw in the evidence Carr cites.

Carr opens with a UCLA study in which volunteers “used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics — the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car — (while an) MRI scanned their brains …”

Well, Bathtub was roiling at this point. Bathtub wanted me to stop reading, to forget about Carr. Why? Because long experience has taught Bathtub that Google is useful for learning precisely because it allows users to sprint after information at the moment when curiosity strikes, at the exact moment when our minds are most primed to receive, value, and retain information. And Bathtub somehow doubted that these UCLA volunteers, gamely going along with the experiment, were ablaze with curiosity about the nutritional benefits of chocolate or vacationing in the Galapagos Islands or buying a new car or whatever the other “preselected topics” may have been. So Bathtub didn’t think this experiment had anything to tell Carr or you or me about real-life Internet use.

But Bathtub is nothing if not fair. So Bathtub then reminded me that I’ve always learned better by hearing than by reading and that it would be a simple matter to put Carr’s piece on my Kindle, plug in some headphones, leash up the dogs, go outside, stop worrying about pee-puddled carpeting, and command the Kindle’s little text-to-speech robot man to read Carr’s words to me while the dogs sniffed around the front yard. So that’s what I did.

I ended up believing that Carr gets things right and wrong: right when he acknowledges our agency by writing that “we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture”;  wrong, among other places, when he implicitly denies our agency with the “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” subtitle of his forthcoming book.

The Internet is not doing anything to our brains. We may be doing bad things to our brains. But the things that we are doing have been possible as long as there have been libraries. Any library patron has always been free to read a paragraph, re-shelve the book, grab a new one, skim its preface, re-shelve it, wander to the periodicals section, grab the New York Times magazine, flip to the fancy real estate ads in the back, think of West Egg and East Egg and Jay Gatsby, put down the magazine, head to the fiction section, reach out for Fitzgerald’s classic, realize that he’s never read anything by Fitzgerald’s wife, wonder if this makes him a sexist, decide that it just might, scan the fiction Fitzgeralds until he finds Zelda, grab a copy of Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz, start to read the first paragraph, question his own memory, flip to the author bio to confirm that Zelda was truly married to the Gatsby author, see that Zelda was born in Montgomery, think of the Montgomery bus boycott, remember that he’s been meaning to buckle down and read Taylor Branch’s MLK biographies, head off for the biography section.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

Most of us don’t do that in libraries. But we could.

If Carr’s piece causes people to rethink the choices they make online, I’m all for that. But I’ll be upset if Carr’s piece causes people to flee the Internet or to resign themselves to an online reading experience that, to use those words of yours, is “more like watching the landscape from a train.” It’s not just that we can drive our own train. It’s that we’re free to jump the track, to go where we want at the speed we want with as many or as few distractions, digressions, and deep-thinking dives as we choose.

If you’ve read this far, Andrew, you may still be a more patient reader than you imagine yourself to be.

With best wishes,

David