Must Read: What Are We Becoming?

This is not about FISA, or the presidential election, or the Iraq War or climate change or the potential attack on Iran or nuclear war. This is about you. And me. If you're reading this, then you should read this, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," by Nicholas Carr, in this month's The Atlantic. I took it with me on vacation, but didn't read it until this morning upon Andrew Sullivan's recommendation. Teasers:

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

...Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page... Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”