Final Spin on CNN.com

Well, this is a surprise… This post ended up today at the top of one of CNN.com’s automatic search pages. No wonder I’ve been getting a lot more hits than usual!

I’m not too sure what’s pushing my blog at the top of the “decapitation bus” search, in front of CBS, Fox News and others. The Internet works in mysterious ways.

I’d rather prefer this blog be known for something less creepy… Care to discuss how to deal with Angry Canucks, anyone? How about Tobacco smuggling? The use and misuse of statistical data by reporters and PR professionals?

Is the Net eating your brain?

Just like HAL getting shut down in 2001: A Space Odyssey one plastic memory block at a time, is our brain losing the ability to read long texts because of too much exposure to the Internet? That is the question Nicholas Carr is asking in the current issue of The Atlantic.

Carr laments that “now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

I feel the same way, but I thought it came from a lifetime of reading newsprint. Or aging. Now I have the Internet to blame.