You want anecdotes? I got 'em.

The July/August Atlantic came yesterday. The cover story with the cute (though hardly original) but misleading title - misleading because it's not Google he blames, it's the whole Internet and the way everything on it is presented to us - is by Nicholas Carr, who complains that teh intertubes have ruined his ability to concentrate on anything longer than a couple of paragraphs:

"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. 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. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do." (Nonetheless, I note, he manages to write a lengthy article that he apparently expects will find readers.)

He quotes a pathologist who says "I can't read War and Peace anymore. I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb."

Carr's next line is so very true: "Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive answer."

But being so incapable of sustained concentration, he can't wait for them, so he just barrels on, intimating that it's not our fault, that the Internet has changed our brains and our very way of thinking. Scary stuff.

But anecdotes don't prove much. Or, as it's more frequently put, the plural of anecdote is not data. Still, he's got his anecdotes, so let me share mine.

I read 30 or 40 pages every day on the bus. And Saturday I read over 600 pages of prose (a couple of Alison Taylor novels - finished one and read the other straight through). I didn't find my mind wandering, get fidgety, lose the thread - in fact, I often get annoyed when the bus pulls into the station.

And you know I read a lot in the blogosphere.

So if you can't concentrate, if you can't keep your mind on hard stuff or sustained argument, don't blame the Internet. Just get back in practice.