Sam Leith

There are two main schools of thought. One is that modern culture is making us cleverer. In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson observes that IQ scores in the west are rising, and argues that pop culture – from soaps to video games to the web – is responsible. In the other corner is Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. He thinks the web is making us more stupid. We surf the shallows in a state of permanent distraction, and concentrate on no single thing for long enough to engage properly with it. Since much of our mental energy is spent processing the medium, little is left for the message. Carr, then, is a descendent of Plato, who mistrusted writing because he thought people would stop bothering to know anything if it was all there in books.

What both seem to agree on, however, is that a defining characteristic of digital culture is that it divides the attention. That has become a fact about the texture of our lives. We experience anxiety, fragmentation, semiotic overload.