Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. The internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our deep thoughts and our ability to remember.
I have a hard time taking these Cassandras of the Computer Age seriously. For one thing, they are much more interested in our fears than in the facts. In his book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, the British linguist David Crystal demonstrates that many of the dire warnings about texting are little more than urban legends. Texting doesn’t lead to bad spelling, he finds. In fact, Crystal writes, “texting actually improves your literacy, as it gives you more practice in reading and writing.”
More significantly, the ominous warnings feed on a popular misconception about how the mind works. ...
