Heh. Didn't Plato say this about writing?

Interesting that he mentions McLuhan...McL perhaps wasn't a very disciplined thinker, and comes across as a bit of a zeitgeister-shyster, but his ideas are still interesting and provocative. I think it's pretty clearly true that media technologies have an effect on how people think. Search "duz web mak us dumr?" at my blog for a link to some thoughts on this.

Speaking only for myself my consumption of written words has increased a thousand fold since the advent of the Internet. Call me a low-hanging fruit picker but I read more now because more is available and easier to access. I would not read or even scan hundreds of articles in dozens of publications if I had to go to a library or bookstore to do so. Ditto for books now available from Project Gutenberg or endlessly fascinating (and enjoyably arcane) articles from the Catholic Encyclopedia last edited in 1911, to say nothing of blogs like this one that wouldn’t be available unless they were printed published distributed and sold the old way---which of course they wouldn’t be. This availability has not decreased my purchase of books but rather has increased it because the reviews and background on them available from Amazon and other web sites help me find what I like and need and avoid what I don’t. I correspond in writing with friends and acquaintances much more than before the availability of email which I believe has helped my written communication skills if for no other reason than increased practice. I could go on to include music, art and science but my point would be the same: I consume more now than before and that consumption leads me to a greater appreciation of those subjects than I would have if my only access to them was off-screen.

Dossier -- That's very much my pattern, too. The internet has been a godsend for me on every level. It's been a great prompt to both curiosity and intellectual accountability: it encourages me to ask questions, and leaves me with no excuse for not looking them up right then and there. My attention span has changed, I will admit, and in ways I dislike and struggle against. But the overall advantages have been amazing in the world-opening sense. That said, I don't do Facebook or Myspace or Twitter or any of those social networking things; I hate IM and never do it; I never text message ... and in general have resisted the push toward accelerated, diffuse, electronic socializing. Bauerlein's most damning point -- made eloquently and at length in his book -- is that this is what the younger folks are doing with their online time, to the exclusion of everything else. It's cultural and generational -- and we can't necessarily use our own experience with the internet as a measure of theirs. I find all of this stuff immensely fascinating -- it gets at the most undefined but important aspects of how we form and maintain our intellectual, emotional, creative, and social habituses. For my own part, email has been incredibly important as an antidote to the telephone -- which I have always regarded with horror as a device of terrible potential intrusion into one's day. I never pick up the phone; it's too disruptive. I was like that even before answering machines were the norm. So my own trajectory with digital devices has followed my pre-existing need to find forms of communication that honor privacy and facilitate respect for one's rhythms of concentration. The sheer permeability of people who have grown up endlessly plugged in is almost beyond my imagining...