Internet Paralysis

This is the second article being published for the Pastor's Pen this month (Sept 08)

“Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along like a guy on a Jet Ski,” writes Nicholas Carr in a provocative article titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The article was published this summer in the Atlantic Monthly. In it the author observes how he is less and less able to read a book cover to cover or to follow a complex argument to its conclusion.

He postulates that over time, reading blogs and email has changed the way he handles words. He skims things he used to dig into. He clicks from one article to the next without staying with something to the end. The internet, for all of its upside, does change the way we learn and handle information. We are less patient with words. We lack the ability to concentrate. Our work is more scattered and less focused.

The poet Donald Hall once made the point that contentment is found in something he calls absorbedness. It is “early morning hours, concentration on the page and its words, total loss of identity, hours that pass like seconds or without any notion of time elapsing.” In other words, the quality of life is improved by our ability to get lost in our work or our reading without a sense of distractedness. On the flip side, a frenetic quality to life leaves us frazzled.

In my own life, I recognize symptoms of distraction. I keep track of the books I read, and when I first started my work as a pastor, I was reading 30 to 40 books a year. Now I must confess I’m down to about 10. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve had six children in those years, but I also notice as my internet use has increased during this time, my ability to get absorbed in reading or study has been hampered. It’s far easier to check email a dozen times a morning than to sit down and translate a Greek passage from the New Testament.

If Nicholas Carr is right, Christians of all people should be concerned. We are people of the book. Our faith arises out of the scriptures. Our ability to grow to maturity in the faith rests on our ability to read and ponder the bible. Whether you’re engaged in serious biblical exegesis or practicing lectio divina (a more contemplative style of reading the bible), you need the ability to concentrate and to attend to the words on the page.

Friends and civic leaders alike extol the virtues of the internet. I use the internet myself. It’s helpful for finding sermon illustrations and keeping up with friends. Yet the internet does seem to be changing the way we learn and think. We might have more information at our fingertips, but we are less and less able to understand and digest that information. If internet use is paralyzing our analytical ability, we might want to do something about it now—while we can still think about it.