Genius has its limits, but stupidity has none

As I read Carr's article I begin to think of my last post on Harris's piece.  I began the post saying that he managed to write a considerable amount about very little and it was quite boring.  As I think about Carr's points and the reading I've been doing lately, it might not be the fault of Harris after all.  It seems as I read anything that lasts longer than a few pages on one topic, I find my brain drifting off.  I still read the words on the page but my mind doesn't process them.  I instead think about what I'm doing later, if I'm hungry or tired and what interesting things I could go look up on the Internet.  The web provides us with so much immediate information.  I don't read ten pages about something when someone else can summarize it in a paragraph.  Unless required by a class, I don't even open books anymore.  All through middle school I read lengthy novels, even The Da Vinci Code.  I doubt I'd be able to read a quarter of that now.

Even as I was reading this article, I found my mind drifting off after the fourth page.  The first half of the article I was immersed in it and finding connections it had to my life.  By the second half, I was bored of the idea and wanted to move on to a new one.  This is crazy to think about and I'm in complete agreement with Carr's point.  The Internet is decreasing our attention spans and increasing human stupidity exponentially.  The web has made our thought process similar to the way a political debate operates.  Our brains only have so much time to spend on one idea as a politician only gets a limited amount of time to say what he must.  Once the time is up, the topic must switch.  

The answer Carr gives, that are way of thinking is being altered, matches up with the notes we shared on our Internet usage.  Even those of my classmates that spent time on news sites spent only a short amount of time there.  You could see their brains jumping from topic to topic as they changed URL’s and monitored facebook.  I agree with Carr that were heading down a dark road.  I have good memories of being able to sit down on a Saturday and read an entire book.  I remember it almost being a competition of who could finish the new Harry Potter book the fastest.  This is incomprehensible to me today and I wonder if future generations of children will even be able to experience that.