The internet is just the latest in a long line of dei-ex-machina that are being blamed for stupefying us.

In his new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr says the internet “scatters our attention” and transforms us “into lab rats pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social and intellectual nourishment”.

Clearly Carr has hit a nerve. Is there a serious publication in the English-speaking world that hasn’t picked-up on his theme? As a freelance feature writer I’m well aware of what is really at work here: a book is an event that offers justification enough for an editor to run the story – editors are nothing if not capricious and even a pseudo-event to hang a story on is enough to keep their blood pressure down.

Arguably this itself is a sign of dumbing down. After all, if something is interesting and novel, surely that is sufficient warrant to write about it? I also had the misfortune to hear about the book on one of the dumbest, most bitty and scatterbrained programmes on Irish radio… But let’s not go there. 

Carr’s neurological argument is not without merit and there are questions to be asked about how we adapt to new environments. After all it is humanity’s ability to adapt that has seen us thrive.

Additionally, the internet’s hypertextual nature is an assault on narrative. For example, there are links embedded in this story but I don’t really want you to click them – I want you to read the damn story, not go flitting-off to read the stories I am now obliged to track down for you.

But there is more than a touch of the jeremiad about this latest little media obsession. Certainly, blasting the internet for making morons of us all appeals to a certain kind of conservative outlook (the same kind that, not so very long ago, thought women and the working class shouldn’t read books for fear they would start getting funny ideas).

As is often the case, the truth is messy and refuses to be strait-jacketed into the kind of bite-sized chunks that make good newspaper copy.

For a start, the internet is what we make of it. Whether you read long, involved narratives about foreign wars, essays on string theory or globules of celebrity information is up to you – and they need not be mutually exclusive.

Besides, there are other reasons why some of us may be experiencing shortened attention spans.

By any reasonable standard, I am “dumbed down”. I find myself reading fewer books than at any prior point in my life, certainly I am reading much less literature.

In the last year I have managed to read precious few novels. I am always reading the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (I’ve read it dozens of times in the last three years) and also managed to drag myself through the (very good) Death Ship by B. Traven. 

Other than that I have only been able to read at all thanks to the twin devils of audiobooks and books I’ve read before: Anathem by Neal Stephenson (passable), The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks (quite good), Neuromancer by William Gibson (superb but dated), The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco (excellent but sad) and Baudolino, also by Eco (excellent but with an unsatisfactory rimshot-worthy ending). 

So, am I now an imbecile? Possibly, but I think not. I do wade through dozens of non-fiction books, thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and countless examples of the stream of reports, papers and press releases that JG Ballard called “invisible literature”. 

Do I feel poorer for the loss of literature? Yes, I do.

It would be easy to blame “the internet” for my much abbreviated attention span; but it would also be inaccurate. In reality, the problem is a wider one: I am preoccupied. There are things, unrelated to the internet I hasten to add, on my tiny little mind that mean I am disinclined to read long, complex novels or contemplate works of art.

This is not to say there is no temptation to read the latest trivial crap published on the internet, especially after a long day of endlessly following a mind-numbing news cycle as I often do, but the significant thing about the entire dumbing down debate, from its reappearance in the mid-1990s onwards, is that it ignores the fact that the intellectual elites in society appear to have lost faith in their own intelligence. The literary and artistic elites, and their state benefactors, have become obsessed with “the shallows” of popular culture, hoping to not only make their work more “accessible” but also to bask in the reflected glory of pop.

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