No, only you can, but if that is what you want, help is at every hand!

This important essay, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, does not mention map reading, but I think Nicholas Carr ties together a great number of observations on the same theme I elaborate on this blog.

Google, audible turn by turn navigation, or glancing at a little online map image instead of getting the atlas off the shelf does not make you stupid.  What they do is make it much too easy to let your mental habits drift while you fail to take proper account of the gains and losses to your mental powers.  Before you know it, something has happened that you might not have chosen had you thought it through beforehand.

In the essay, Carr and other highly intelligent, literate people confess that after years of googling, surfing and skimming online content they have lost the patience or even the ability to read a book!  Has that happened to you yet?  Not me, thanks.  Carr and his anecdotal cohort seem bemused at what has happened to them.  They are, after all, busy and successful.

Not every book does this for me, but the reason I consider the novel one of the greatest art forms is this.  Often upon completing an excellent novel, I am pleasantly surprised by the intensity of the moment when I contemplate the whole of what I have just absorbed.  A vast blob of emotional truth crystallizes and shimmers before me.  The  unknowable becomes known. I would say it is inexpressible but it is not:  The author expressed it!  It took thousands of words.  No wonder I sound silly trying to describe the experience in a paragraph.  Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf: “Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking”.

Everywhere are messages and pressures urging us to buy and get with the latest thing.  Skeptics like me are merely trying to provide balance and perspective, not stop progess.

Mind control is here.  It always has been.  How much control do you want to take and how much do you want to hand over?