Nicolas Carr doesn't matter

So, someone sent me this link:

http://chaucer.umuc.edu/blogcip/collectanea/2008/06/scattering_thought_across_the.html

It's a recent blog posting by Georgia Harper, a widely recognized copyright expert and friend of a friend. In it, she cites an article by Nicolas Carr in the Atlantic entitled, foolishly, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

So here's what I wrote back:
 

Georgia’s getting a little conservative here. She has made a substantial contribution to the field of copyright… precisely because she has synthesized so much of the material on copyright available on the web! In other words, no-one looks to her for the nature of cognitive theory, rather they look to her as a kind of compendium of details and best practices in copyright… in other words, she is bizarrely exactly what Carr is arguing against. Still, she’s easily forgiven, and widely respected in her field…

 
Carr is quite another case. I’ve never been fond of him, because he doesn’t get it, and never has. He’s responsible for all that talk about tech being the fifth utility, which always made me mad, but which network engineers, who don’t get the demeaning implications, keep repeating.

 
As for his argument: I used to get frustrated with Martin and others at NMC who developed a trope against ‘Technological Determinism’, as if there were some kind of natural thought process unaffected by the technology of distribution. The counterarguments to that are so obvious as to rend the idea ridiculous, and Carr makes them (Plato, Nietzsche, Gutenberg). But he cites them, and then leaps to a completely wrong conclusion. He’s blinded by his own self-interested cultural advantage. Based on his education and his social class (and his mindset), he is exactly the kind of person who benefited from the old means of distribution, the pre-web consciousness. Then, citing someone else, he makes this leap: “Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”

 
Wolf’s work is interesting, and he demeans it by taking it out of context and using it for his own purposes. He wants to argue that what he’s used to, what he has benefited from, is the best possible thing. Essentially, he’s arguing that long texts are good, that long things are what smart people read, and it makes them even smarter. Not exactly an argument designed to please a poet, who would cite the tradition that the best thing is “many things in few words”. In fact, any poet worth his or her salt would argue that prose readers (and many prose writers) are dullards, who need things to go on and on and on before they can “get it”. There’s a huge difference between “deep” reading and “long” reading, and when Carr conflates the two, he betrays a fundamental misunderstanding.

 
So, ok, Carr’s no intellectual luminary, and perhaps it’s unfair to ask him to be one. Let’s just take his point on its own terms: “In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.”

Let’s drop the last phrase, since Carr seems to believe, wrongly, that we give birth to “our own ideas”, but admits by his own choice of verbs that we do no more than become their step-parents. Now, if I were writing a “long book”, would I want the reader to make his “own associations”, draw her “own inferences and analogies?” Doesn’t such a scenario argue precisely that the reader has stopped reading?  Are we to think that Nabokov wanted us to stop paying attention for a few pages while we were off contemplating? Or that Virginia Woolf wasn’t carefully constructing every sentence? As if she wanted her readers to wander off, distracted?

In fact, Woolf is relevant here. Take this passage:

“The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being.... The line raced through the girl's fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream.”
 

So, yes, Woolf values contemplation as an imaginative act, which leads to discovery. But the girl is not reading or writing when she gets there, the reading or writing is just the way in. In fact, to say that reading en soi is contemplation ignores the last 75 years of cognitive theory. Carr confuses the two activities for his own self-serving purposes. A good poet can induce that same contemplative state in just a few lines.  And what exactly is that state? Is it not the mind leaping all over the place, ranging broadly, in fact, hyperlinking? And understanding, in a Heideggerean sense, the interconnectedness of things? Doesn’t the “web reading” Carr deplores get us closer to that? And who is he to demean, in print, the lived experience of so many millions of web readers?