Cannot read being lost

Nicholas Carr from The Atlantic on how the web has changed people’s ability to read proven by a recent study:

“My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

I often can see the described behavior (skimming rather than reading) in my own daily reading habits. The usual suspects (information overload and attention economy) are also resonated in an article by the New York Times [via]:

“A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, … on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.”

Although being guilty as charged, described counter-measures like Gmail’s “email addict” feature or “zero email” fridays sound too harsh.