An Experiment in Scotch

Lofty titles aside (really, I some­times just make up titles to posts because I feel like my site design looks ter­ri­ble with­out one. I digress), I do have a not that impres­sive thought on what surf­ing of the Inter­net does to our brain. I’m cur­rently read­ing The Best And The Brightest and while I don’t cur­rently have com­ments about that book specif­i­cally (though I hope to soon, it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing trip through the his­tory and the events lead­ing up to our involve­ment in Viet­nam), I do have a more abstract com­ment on what hap­pens when you read some­thing that takes intel­lec­tual power to com­pre­hend and fol­low it imme­di­ately with “The Internet”.

Specif­i­cally, you for­get every­thing you just read. More and more, I’m begin­ning to think the shit I read on the Inter­net makes me stu­pid, not because it’s inher­ently stu­pid in con­tent (though much of it is) but because it saps atten­tion in a way that makes it impos­si­ble to retain the pre­vi­ously read mate­r­ial. This isn’t par­tic­u­larly ground­break­ing but it’s eye-opening when you are deep into a book that has about as many char­ac­ters in it as War and Peace and you can’t remem­ber any of what you just read once you check your RSS aggregator.

I’m start­ing to seri­ously con­sider lim­it­ing what I read on the Inter­net and how I use it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place, lots of good porn out there and I cer­tainly have learned more from Wikipedia than I could ever have imag­ined. But still, the dis­gust­ing men­tal sick­ness I feel after doing noth­ing but surf­ing the web all day is start­ing to open my eyes to every­thing that’s wrong with the con­stant jan­gly thing dan­gled before my eyes on the web.

As usual, no amaz­ing con­clu­sions here. But I’m really think I’m get­ting dumber each day I fire up Firefox.

Apro­pos of noth­ing, if you want to read a phe­nom­e­nal book about the polit­i­cal his­tory that led us into Viet­nam, read The Best And The Bright­est. It’s really that good. If you want a his­tory of just the Viet­nam war and how our lead­ers let us down, check out A Bright Shin­ing Lie. I highly rec­om­mend both.