Fascinating, @donkeypong, and a subject especially close to my heart, as reader & writer.

Interested in how the Internet can detrimentally affect our concentration, meaning our capacity for immersive reading and/or critical thinking, I remember being set alight a few years ago by an Atlantic magazine article (which the author, Nicholas Carr, developed into a fine book). The title of the piece encapsulated all my misgivings, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the internet is doing to our brains”.

Shortly after this seminal, but somewhat alarmist, piece, a slew of articles, backed by scientific studies, made a counter argument: Google and the Internet might be making us smarter. True, multi-tasking stands to make memory worse, they suggested, but certain types of memory are improving as search engines reroute our brains.

“Abundance of books makes men less studious” stated a critic of the printing press, Hieronimo Squarciafico, as early as the 15th century. This might well be the case today, too, with the wealth of unsorted, uneven information available at our fingertips.

Yet, perhaps this truth also speaks to our innate laziness as a species, rather than the evils of abundance. For those with discipline and curiosity to sift through the buried treasures (as well as the sanity not to entirely live online), the Internet need not be a soul-destroying monster but can be, potentially, a life-enhancing tool.

In closing, thank you, for your sober recommendations on how to lead a balanced and healthy life (for non-elites, without The Classics).
I’m especially grateful to you for recommending poetry—short, but profound—and would add to that list aphorisms or proverbs to meditate on, such as these: https://t.co/GxYb1fIdWB

Cheers,
Yahia