Here’s a quick review of my “interesting article of the week” for the second week of June (the one with Friday the Thirteenth in it). The article is from the July/August 08 Atlantic, titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, by Nicholas Carr. Mr. Carr is worried that the Internet is changing things for our youth and for our society, in terms of how they get their information and how they do their thinking. He’s worried that people, especially young folk, are relying too much on Google searches and hyperlinks and video clips. They are getting too accustomed to skimming massive volumes of information, flitting from site to site and subject to subject, instead of sitting back and reading deeply on one topic from one author. Carr thinks that perhaps our brains will be re-wired because of this. Because of the social forces and corresponding biological factor set off by modern information technology and its close cousins, the electronic media and the entertainment industry, there will be no going back to the good old days of reading (and finishing) books and long magazine articles. Except for old timers like myself who grew up in the days of libraries with paper card catalogs, no one will even have the ability to sit back and deeply ponder things such as the effects of racism on the deindustrialization of American cities during the second half of the 20th Century.

Well now, there certainly seems to be a lot of truth to this. Blog sites that provide short information blips every hour on the hour seem to be a lot more popular than those publishing longer essays every week or so (which helps to explain why this blog never made it!). But then again, the book isn’t dead yet. Amazon still sells a lot of them on line. Technology still hasn’t come up with a substitute for that good, comfortable feeling that you get when you sit down with an interesting book. I think it’s much nicer to read from something that comes from other living beings, i.e. paper from trees. It’s just not very cozy and comfortable reading from an electronic screen, no matter how light and portable they have now become. You just can’t curl up to a good flatscreen and while away a rainy afternoon.

So the book is not dead yet; it might be around for decades to come. But still, the statistical trends regarding book sales are somewhat disturbing. I checked out the annual sales estimates from the Association of American Publishers (www.publishers.org) going back thru 1992 (with the help of the “Wayback Machine” on archive.org). Anyway, in 1992, the estimated net sales for the book industry in the US were 9.46 billion dollars. Five years later, in 1997, they were at $17.2 billion. So the average growth rate in sales from ’92 to ’97 was 12.7%. Sales for 2002 were $22.40 billion; so the average growth rate for the next five years was 5.4%. In 2007, net sales were estimated at $24.96 billion. Sounds good, but the average growth rate from ’02 to ’07 slowed down to 2.2%. Remember, these are nominal dollars; during this time, inflation was chugging along at around 3% per year. So, after 2002, there isn’t any “real growth” in book revenues. Anyone want to bet that nominal sales will go flat and real sales decline from ’07 to 2012? (I’m surely not betting against it!). You can see why Amazon is expanding into music downloads, electronic goods, and all kinds of other household stuff and personal items.

Carr says that “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” Personally, I don’t think that “good old-fashioned intelligence” is done for. But it may become a rarer and rarer trait over the next 80 to 100 years. The masses are already increasingly enthralled with entertaining technologies provided and controlled by a small band of international media corporations and cooperative big governments; meanwhile a small class of really smart people direct those corporations and governments — yep, sounds much like science fiction. According to such fiction, most of those really smart people will get together over time and figure out a way to gain totalitarian control of the brainwashed masses. Meanwhile, a small band of loners and rebels will realize what’s going on, and will seek to “unplug” people from “the net” as to fight back against the powers that otherwise keep them contented. It’s The Matrix without the body vats.

Perhaps that won’t happen; just little old me trying to be dramatic. But if it does, and if somehow my little scribblings floating on the vast digital seas of the Internet are preserved and readable in 100 years (which I doubt will happen, given the fact that Google hardly takes my site seriously), well then. Don’t say that Mr. Carr and I didn’t warn you!