Far from messing with our brains, the internet has set our minds free

According to a group of scientists and writers who have pompously named themselves the Slow Reading Movement, the internet is destroying our ability to read serious literature. The Sloooooooooow Reeeeeeeeeeading Moooooooooovement fears that our brains, bombarded as they are with information, are evolving away from the “traditional deep-reading circuitry” that we have developed over many millennia. Instead, they are developing new circuits to help us skim through Twitter, Facebook, the Telegraph website…

“I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University, who has written a paper on the subject for the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. “The brain is plastic its whole lifespan,” she told the Washington Post. “[It] is constantly adapting.” She added that after a long day reading emails and surfing the internet, she had tried to read Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game: “I’m not kidding, I couldn’t do it. It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organising my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.”

Probably about to join the Slow Reading Movement is Dame Gillian Lynne, who pronounced this week – in a statement as sweeping as her choreography at the ballet – “I hate anything digital.” (Even your radio, Dame Gillian?) “All everybody ever does is look at a machine,” the 88-year-old continued. “The whole art of conversation is going out the window, as is language.”

It’s one of those funny ironies of life that the most stunning technological developments, the ones that improve our existence in untold ways, are the things we heap the most scorn on. The postal service, the phone, television… they were all going to ruin Western civilisation. And yet, really, the worst thing they did was give us The X Factor.

And now we have the internet, a vast, shadowy, invisible mass of… stuff , which serves as a convenient scapegoat for all society’s ills. Violent behaviour? Blame the internet. A generation of stupid children? That’ll be the internet. Fleeting attention spans? Internet, internet, int- hang on, I’ve just received a tweet. Better check it.

We like to blame the internet because it lets us off the hook. But it’s a bit like an alcoholic making a bottle of whisky bear the responsibility for his having drunk it, or a drug addict blaming her dealer for selling her a fix of heroin. The web is undoubtedly – pardon the rehab speak – a great facilitator for those of us who have a tendency towards distraction, and it is to blame for myriad pains in the buttocks: “lolcats”, “selfies”, “vaguebooking”, endless bloody passwords, endless bloody pictures of people’s coffee, know-it-all commenters, the phrase “Is this really news?” (as used by aforementioned know-it-all commenters), viruses, perverts, Viagra spam, porn for the perverts to watch with their Viagra spam.

But it’s my fault that I don’t sit down and read Tolstoy of an evening, not the web’s. The internet has opened up our world and allowed us to exchange ideas with people we previously would never have encountered. It has allowed people to fall in love and find long-lost relatives. And anyone who has ever watched Twitter for an evening will know that the art of conversation has not been lost, as Dame Gillian claims – it’s just changed, and got much, much bigger. On social networks, everything is a conversation waiting to happen. A debate is never more than a click away.

We are derogatory about the accuracy of Wikipedia, without stopping to think about what a minor miracle it is that people actually devote their free time to the altruistic cause of providing information to others. When I was a young girl, if I wanted to find out about, say, Tutankhamun, I had to beg my parents to take me to the library. But when my daughter is a bit older, all she will have to do is sit down at a cheap laptop with a Wi-Fi connection, and she will be away. With the internet, the potential for a child’s imagination to roam is enormous – and with parental controls, you can even make sure that imagination doesn’t roam on to a site full of torture porn. What’s not to love?

On the internet, I can get the groceries without wanting to commit hara-kiri while queueing at Sainsbury’s meat counter on a Saturday afternoon. I can tell my mum and dad whether Cilla Black released her first single in 1963 or 1964, and not have to listen to them argue about it for 45 minutes. I can instantly email a picture of my child to her far-away grandparents. So when the likes of Dame Gillian and the Slow Reading Movement start warning of the grave dangers of the internet, I say this: the internet has made life easier for us; it has freed up our time so we can do other things. Like reading a good book, even.