Why does everyone pick on Google?

In his article "Is Google Making Us Stupid," Nicholas Carr opines the loss of critical reading skills and, for lack of better phrasing, a healthy reading "stamina". He aims his finger at Google, allowing it to stand in for the whole of cyberspace. Personally, I think his finger is misdirected. But I do agree that the reading public today suffers from infantile attention spans, as well as an insatiable appetite for "shallow."

I hear it from students all the time--"this article was too long . . ." and "I had to take a break after the first few pages." Just last class, when I offered a warning to my students that Monday's assigned reading was long and they shouldn't procrastinate, a student called to my attention that Carr's article, when pasted into word, was a whopping 11 pages! (; ;) While I made light of the complaint, I'm sure I didn't hide my astonishment very well. When did 11 pages of text become "long"?

I don't fault my students, not really. They have, as Carr notes, grown up using the internet which does reduce the written word to small chunks of information, to headlines, to hyperlinks, and the like which all can be accessed at lightning speed. They also txt which also delivers communication, abbreviated communication, in as little time as it takes to tap "send"--unless, that is, they have Sprint, in which case it could take HOURS to deliver that text message. My point is that students have been immersed their entire lives in communication that yields immediate satisfaction--whatever one's purpose. I don't like this any more than Carr does, and I will continue to assign these terribly long and boring articles (because I think there's something to be learned from the experience of reading a long, boring text in the same way I think there's something to be learned from reading a short blog entry [something I've still not been able to master], an interactive website, a personal text message). Because, as one of my students mentioned in her blog, we can and should be both. Yes, we sometimes want and deserve to consume texts rapidly, but we also need to be able to sustain a reading of a longer text when the situation demands--like when we sign a lease on a car, or enroll in a class and receive a syllabus. To decide one is not going to read these sometimes lengthy documents is to place ourselves in a fairly vulnerable (and stupid) position.