\u201cOnce I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. <\/i>Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
Nicholas Carr<\/i><\/p>\n
While preparing for this fall semester, I came across the citation for an article from The Atlantic.<\/i> \u00a0In mid-2008, writer Nicholas Carr asked<\/a>, \u201cIs Google making us stupid?\u201d<\/p>\n Carr, a writer and former deep reader, noticed that after a decade of using the internet, he cannot engage with reading like he used to. \u201cNow my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. . . . The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.\u201d His article suggested that the way the internet works not only changes what we read, but how we read, and perhaps even changes the very way we think.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve addressed the internet\u2019s effect on our lives before<\/a>, but here I want to address what the internet has done to our ability to read and to engage deeply with text. What Carr says about reading is, I notice, true. After spending more than a decade with volumes of information at my fingertips and with the ability to, in seconds, move from one bit of information to another to yet another, it\u2019s much harder now to engage deeply with any single text.<\/p>\n For me, if I have to scroll down two or three or\u2014gasp!\u2014four times to completely read an article online, well, I\u2019m going to be hard-pressed to do it in a single, uninterrupted session. I\u2019m off, after that first screen\u2019s worth of text, to see what\u2019s trending on msn.com, to peek at the headlines on cnn.com, to check my email again, to maybe order that shirt that I like (that I\u2019ve looked at online five times already).\u00a0 And this is a process I\u2019m likely to repeat not 15 minutes later while trying to read the second or third screen\u2019s worth of text, even though it\u2019s likely that nothing has changed since I last checked those same sites. I\u2019ve come to expect (and maybe at some level, require) my information in convenient bite-sized chunks; in this way, perhaps, I feel I can manage all the information that I will receive during the course of the day. If there\u2019s something long that I must read\u2014or really want to read\u2014I\u2019ll often print it out and save it for a later time, usually when I\u2019ve removed myself from the computer, and even then, I\u2019m still distracted.<\/p>\n Like Carr, I don\u2019t think my experience is unusual. In fact, people\u2019s lack of capacity for deep reading is probably more prevalent today than it was in 2008, when Carr published his article. But this is not how I prefer it. From time to time, I am still capable of losing myself in a book, oblivious to the outside world, but those times are becoming more and more scarce. And it worries me to think about what this lack of capacity for deep reading means.<\/p>\n In the last several years we have begun training lawyers-to-be who have never not<\/i> known or used the internet. Today\u2019s law students, on average born in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, were mere elementary school students when the internet blossomed. By the time they reached high school and college, they were using computers regularly to complete their school research and school projects, and to stay ever-so-connected with their friends. Their desire for\u2014or entitlement to, perhaps, in their view\u2014computers is one of the things that makes the debate about banning laptops<\/a> in the classroom so vexing. The computer is not, as for some of us from older generations, an instrument that allows us to expand and express our thinking; for them, it seems to have become part of the thinking process itself.<\/p>\n For if it is true that there is a lack of depth and focus in reading, this is problematic for law students and lawyers because reading and engaging deeply with text<\/a> are crucial skills for lawyers. Law is so rooted in the written word. By one estimate, law students will read 2,500 pages in their casebooks alone by the end of their first semester in law school.<\/p>\n To study the law is to dive deeply into text that is unlike any other you\u2019ve read (especially if you\u2019re reading cases from the 19th and early 20th centuries) and to carefully parse through it to divine meaning. It\u2019s really difficult to do that if you find yourself constantly distracted and you\u2019ve barely finished reading the facts of a case.<\/p>\n Further complicating things is that much of what one reads in law school was meant to be read in a print reporter or a text, not on a computer screen or tablet device. Trying to read these documents online can be challenging, awkward, and especially tiring; not only is there the issue of losing concentration with the length and depth of the reading, but also the formatting appears awkward, and the lure of more interesting information is just a click away from that screen. You think you\u2019ll take a \u201cquick\u201d break from the tedium of reading, but the next thing you know, it\u2019s 30, 45, 60 minutes later, and you\u2019re now just returning to focus on that case.<\/p>\n I say all this not meaning to suggest that we forgo the internet. The internet is wonderful and incredibly useful. For example, I had to type in only \u201cis goo\u201d in Google\u2019s search bar before the rest of the title to Carr\u2019s article filled itself in. I hit enter, and viola! Carr\u2019s article was the first result in the list. It took all of, oh, five seconds. Fifteen years ago\u2014maybe even slightly less\u2014tracking down Carr\u2019s article would have required a trip to a library that would have been large enough to have had The Atlantic <\/i>archives on site, or else I would have had to wait for my request to be filled, which might have been another day or two after I finally made it to the library (and which would mean a second trip to the library to retrieve the article).<\/p>\n Nonetheless, it\u2019s worth thinking about how we use the technology we have and to remember to use (or know we should learn) pre-internet skills of digging deeply into what we read. Clearly not all things we read require deep thought. In fact, it\u2019s quite pleasant to have those mindless kinds of reads available from time to time. But as law students and lawyers, we find ourselves more times than not confronted with texts with which we should take time and effort to scuba dive, rather than jet ski.<\/p>\n I am grateful to Ruth Ann McKinney<\/a>, whose second edition of Reading Like a Lawyer: Time-Saving Strategies for Reading Law Like an Expert<\/a> pointed me to Carr\u2019s article and to thinking (deeply) about this subject.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cOnce I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.\u201d Nicholas Carr While preparing for this fall semester, I came across the citation for an article from The Atlantic. \u00a0In mid-2008, writer Nicholas Carr asked, \u201cIs Google making us stupid?\u201d Carr, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,36,42,122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal-education","category-legal-practice","category-legal-writing","category-public","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}