Your last quote included this sentence:

We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends.

This perception is, to me, the crux of the issue. Are our minds actually "designed" to handle a particular pattern, or did our neurological structure respond to natural selection and evolve to be the way it is? And if the latter is the case, how bad is that, really?

A number of years ago I read a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Dr. Jaynes suggested that consciousness was not the original state of the human brain as it emerged in early civilization, but is the result of social pressures that suppressed the bicameral structure of the human brain, which in an undisciplined (that is to say, "natural") state tends to carry on a conversation with itself. Dr. Jaynes suggested that the Voice of God that prophets, shamans and other visionaries tended to hear was actually that other voice, and that as these many Voices of God became increasingly inconvenient, social organizations began to edit their hearers out of the population by placing their owners in some kind of quarantine. Vestal Virgins, sequestered monasteries, dead heretics, mental patients: take your pick. Those who heard voices either learned to keep quiet about it or were silenced.

If Dr. Jaynes was correct -- and I note that his work is placed not in medicine or sociology but in epistemology along with Adler, Sagan and Twain -- then this brain we have now has unacknowledged depths which we have learned to plumb using allegory, analogy, and meditation, after the more direct route of listening to our own personal Voice(s) of God was eliminated as inconvenient, supposedly inaccurate, and definitely destructive to the evolving social pattern of hierarchic authority.

In other words, to paraphrase Twain, evolutionary patterns don't repeat, but they rhyme. We have been here before, even earlier than the development of writing that Socrates (as recorded by Plato in writing) so deplored.

The internet is a challenge to traditional reading, it's true. I find that it hasn't affected my ability to read long articles, nor to read book-length works of fiction and non-fiction, but I do find it difficult to read such things online. For one thing, there is the heat of the machine, and the eye strain of looking at an electronic device, as well as the constant sounds associated with the machine's operation. I also find myself distracted by embedded links, as described in the article, but that's a matter of discipline. I have taught myself not to follow such links until I have finished the article, as I would not drop a book to pursue an endnote. If I can learn to do this, others can be taught. Obviously, the teachers of reading have to take this into account.

We aren't becoming dumber, though the level of educational sophistication is creating a huge chasm between the skilled and the unskilled. I doubt we're becoming shallower, really, but we are going through a period of deconstruction and reconstruction. We become different. What comes of this will be recognizably human to the people who are born after. Imagine, though, ourselves travelling through time to visit them as travellers from the Enlightenment coming to visit us: bewildered, some frightened, some angry, some proud, most all of the above at different moments. It's unsettling to live through a change like this, being not-this, not-that.

Our challenge is not to fight the internet any more than it is to fight the clock, but to understand its challenges and its opportunities. The mechanical clock made it possible for us to become divorced from our corporial rhythms. It also made it possible for us to banish dependency on sunlight to direct our activities, and to determine when things were happening in our environment even at night. The internet makes it possible for us to skim the surface of many topics at the expense of depth of knowledge of those same topics. It also makes it possible for us to know about a great many things that were formerly invisible to us because of time or distance, and by knowing, detect patterns and affect change where none was possible before.

As we remain aware of the dangers of shallowness, we can take measures against them. We can teach specific methods of reading that encourage less skimming and jumping. We can develop databases that include less advertising -- for a price, of course -- and encourage their use in ways that make sense to their users. We can support the arts in all their splendor to encourage people to find a way to articulate the things that the human voice says when it thinks that society isn't listening, or isn't listening enough. Above all, we can nourish the idea of Color. Digital knowledge is black and white, no and yes, zero and one. Color is the concept of Maybe.

There's a lot of reading going on among the young. I know this, because I work with them. Not all the young read, but those that do tend to consume everything: books, magazines, comic books, online materials, all of it. They like each medium for what it brings. (They like newspapers for their local relevance, for their disposability -- really -- for the thrill of seeing someone they know in print, and for papier-mache afterward.) You might find it interesting that kids are reading fiction voraciously, one way or another. Many of their problem novels have to do with what fiction for youth has always dealt with: growth, differentiation from adults, fitting in, and personal vs. societal ethics. This is good news. The fact that so much of it is couched in magical fantasy and cyberpunk rebellion is even better news to me, because it shows me kids who are not thinking digitally. They climb out of the box in search of the colors of humanity regularly. If they seem more shallow than we were at their age, it may merely mean we have been locked out of their language. Welcome to Responsible Adulthood. I welcome Old Age, the age when I will once again be allowed by Youth to conspire with it against the ones in charge.

They also print more. Many fewer of them, compared to us BG (Before Google) people, even have longhand signatures. (Art students are the exception here. What does that tell you?) I teach calligraphy by invitation to fifth graders, including a little history of handwriting. They all love it, even though few of them master it. They remember, too, and use it in other classes. Handwriting is no longer an efficient way for them to communicate, but to those kids, it becomes an art of communication. It says things, and it also says things. he he he

It looks to me as if fear of Google is like fear of carpal tunnel syndrome of the brain. Of course we will do ourselves an injury if we become slaves to repetititititititive patterns, if we only sit and browse and click and type.

The solution, I think, is to be alert but not afraid. We need not think we can't read the way we did, we can't think the way we did, but rather that we don't because we don't make time for it. Computers can search without our constant presence. We can let them search and go for a walk. Pick up a pen. Sing a song. Recite a poem, even an old nursery rhyme. Listen to the cicadas scream at us or the mockingbird whistle and trill. We can keep a box of crayons and an unlined diary with us. We can build dams with sticks or walls with found stones.

We can relearn to play, thus giving our unconscious minds the opportunity to look at the world sideways and whisper insights in our ears. We can retain our depth because we are born with it. It just needs exercise.