A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. My mind isn’t going-so far as I can tell-but it’s changing. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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