The Tendo View

I was fascinated by a recent Wired article excerpting Nicholas Carr’s latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” Perhaps my reaction was stronger since I’d just returned from a vacation during which I was able to read my first fiction book in years. I had picked up South of Broad, Pat Conroy’s latest, in the airport and absolutely loved it.

The first thing I noticed as I began reading the book were the long and melodious sentences so full of rich detail that I could envision and smell and taste exactly what Conroy was describing (typical of vintage Conroy). Consider this sentence:

“When I turned left on Tradd Street, I looked like an ambitious acrobat hurling papers to my right and left as I made my way toward the Cooper River and the rising sun that began to finger the morning ties of the harbor, to dance along the spillways of palmetto fronds and water oaks until the street itself burst into the first flame of morning.”

I was struck by how accustomed I’ve become to the short, terse, bulleted prose that Tendo typically develops for clients’ websites. The criteria for one client requires sentences to be generally 20 words or less; paragraphs are fewer than 75 words; and no more than three paragraphs should appear in a row without a visual break. So the Wired article struck a nerve with me.

Carr cites research that concludes:

“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

He also points to a 1990 experiment that claims the mental calisthenics required of hyperlinks—figuring out whether the link is worth a click, clicking on it, adjusting to a different site’s format, evaluating whether the info is of use, clicking back, etc.—causes us to forget what we’ve read. We’re not retaining the content we skim on the Web.

The Wall Street Journal also excerpted Carr’s book in its Weekend Journal but presented a counterpoint from Clay Shirky’s book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky argues a different point entirely, one based not on research but on historical analysis: He points to Gutenberg’s press and Bible translations, followed by contemporary literature and the mediocrity that followed, as evidence that all new media has a disruptive influence initially but that history proves the medium worthy. And that the “linking together” of the Web lets us “tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about.” And that the social Web’s model of participation has enormous positive effects over television’s consumption model .

As of this writing, 64.7 percent of the WSJ respondents to an online poll agree with Shirky—that the Web makes you smarter. I’m not sure I agree, especially in light of my recent Pat Conroy experience. (For other discussions on this subject, check out GigaOm’s and Slashdot’s posts.)

An article in Monday’s New York Times, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price,” reinforces Carr’s position (and it includes pretty cool interactive tests to gauge your ability to ignore distractions). It focuses not just on the Web but on our growing addiction to gadgets and the multitasking we’re forced to do to consume a fast-growing influx of information and media. “Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress,” according to the NYT piece. Even after you stop multitasking, “fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.”

I can’t help but wonder if Carr and Shirky are asking the right question when they address whether the Internet makes you smarter or dumber.

• Consider the goal. Could it be that consuming information on the Web is just offering us more of the type of experience we’ve done for years: scanning, researching, applying judgment to whether information tells us what we need to know, etc. Isn’t that type of experience more about reaching a conclusion or making a decision rather than learning and retaining and deep thinking? Is the Web allowing us to make better decisions more quickly?
• Where’s the soul? I would argue that scanning on the Web makes us more soul-less than brain-less. Compared with reading Conroy, scanning the Web involves no sense of taste or smell or emotion. Interacting on the Web might involve that—think of comment threads and the YouTube video of the guys reuniting with the tiger (made me cry) and Facebook posts from old friends. But scanning the Web involves very little emotion.
• Form serves function. What does Carr’s research and argument say about the state of content on the Web? If it’s only meant to help you make a decision, maybe terse, bulleted content that’s easily scanned appropriate. But if it’s intended to teach or instruct, perhaps more complex language is not only appropriate but also called for. And would an instructional piece be formatted for easy (and attractive) printing so you could consume it more easily (as I did with the Wired article)? And if it’s intended to provoke, like a blog post, what’s the best format? A podcast? A video?
• Consuming print vs. online. Another relevant question might be this: How many Web users actually try to read online articles? When I find something of interest on the Web, I either print it out to really absorb it, or I save it somewhere so I can print it out and fully absorb it later. So the question isn’t whether I read content online (vs. scanning it), but whether I print it out to read it (vs. reading it on-screen). And whether reading print material rewires my brain in the same way than does consuming Web content.

What do you think? As a corporate marketer, how are you tailoring your Web content for different purposes? As a Web user, do you agree with most WSJ readers that the Web makes you smarter?