Can you remember what your attention span was like before email and the Internet? Can you recall what your work habits were like--and how they felt--before the era of computerized multitasking? Do you have games on your computer? Can you work on anything on screen without checking your email every few minutes? Are you able to concentrate so deeply on a task that you lose track of time--and of competing distractions? Or has the wired world destroyed that particular experience of absorption for you? I'm implicitly addressing readers who are old enough to remember life before the Internet--but I'm interested as well in the thoughts of younger folks whose entire thinking lives have been mediated by it.

I think about these questions a lot, not least because my own life has been changed so dramatically by technology. Both work and leisure are profoundly different than they once were. Managing electronic distractions (no games, though; I could not be less interested in computer games) and handling the multiple, competing, subject-shifting demands of a highly dynamic inbox are major factors in my work day; the shifting is very stressful for me, as I'm someone who likes to move steadily and methodically through a day that I've planned in advance, and you just can't reliably do that anymore if you are doing work that is at all time sensitive. Leisure is different, too--I'm no longer someone who spends significant leisure time surfing or plugged in, though I used to be; I treasure and require time away from the screen, the inbox, the ADD-ish, unpleasantly agitating pattern of surfing from link to link to link. And I'm lucky enough to know what getting away is like, to understand that it is necessary, and to be able to actively cultivate a kind of restoring mental downtime with reading, thinking, cooking, walking, staring into space (highly underrated, especially if there is a nice horizon to look at), anything quiet and non-electronic that gives my brain a chance to settle down, lets the racing thoughts recede and allows things like contemplation, wondering, considering, ruminating, learning, or just plain blankly but pleasantly being, to take their place. The novelty of the 1990s has worn off, the computer has become "the office," and it is good indeed to be able to get away.

But I can do that because I am of a certain age, and I know what getting away is. I wasn't emailing until the end of grad school, and the Internet didn't really become a phenomenon for me until after I was out of school and working. So my foundational experiences are of a slower, quieter world where concentration, absorption, thought, work, and play all worked very differently. And I am lucky enough to be able to draw on those experiences, consciously recreate them, and treasure the slower, simpler, calmer time I can create for myself away from the screen. If I have any ideas whatsoever--good or bad--they happen when I am away from the screen. And If I have shored up any peace of mind at all, or any insight into life, or any wisdom learned from my many mistakes--those things, too, have happened offline.

There is a whole generation of people now who don't have that unwired experience--and whose lives are shaping up very differently as a result. There are advantages to how tech-savvy and linked in they are -- but there are costs as well and we need to gauge them. Mark Bauerlein tackles that in his new book, The Dumbest Generation, reviewed thus by the L.A. Times:

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."

Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, "never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater," writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize -- they've actually made us dumber.

The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."

This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important."

Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."

And all this feeds on itself. Increasingly disconnected from the "adult" world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today's digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.

The obvious argument to make against Bauerlein's is made by this reviewer--that tales of the anti-intellectualism of American youth are part and parcel of American culture and have been for as long as we can recall. And that may be true--though I think it's also arguably true that you need more working knowledge of the world in order to be an informed, responsible citizen today than people did once upon a time. Leaving that aside, Bauerlein's observations about how the wired world reshapes psychology and personality--not only diminishing such things as concentration but also producing the traits of narcissism on a generation-wide basis--are well worth considering. Any reader of Christopher Lasch will know that the culture of narcissism precedes the Web--but it may also be the case that the Web has enabled our tendency toward narcissism to crystallize in damaging, unhealthy ways.