Pancake people
June 30, 2008
If there’s one thing I really enjoy about flying it’s that shift from my daily info skimming routine to sustained and undistracted reading.
My last reading by Nicholas Carr (“Is Google making us stupid?” in The Atlantic) focused on this shift - just the other way round – and how our brains are being rewired as we are developing into horizontal readers, hopping from one source to another, busy chipping away our capacity for concentration, ability to interpret text and make rich mental connections.
Carr cites a wonderful extract of one of Richard Foreman’s essays concluding that we are drained of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, risking turning into pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button:
I share Carr and Foreman’s view that if we lose those quiet spaces we will sacrifice something important not only in ourselves but in our culture.
The dilemma just is that most of us do not start any vertical and deep reading unless we did enough "pancaking” to determine if we will be digging down in the right spot. And the more accessible information there is and the faster that information is outdated, the more will we have to use our time to go pancake first. Starting with our contacts’ microblogs (e.g. twitter), blogs (like this one) and other info providers…
Yes, if you’re reading this blog, you’re well on the way to becoming one of the pancake people ;)
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