Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is still hugely valuable sixteen years after its publication. So is the classic essay that preceded the book, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I first read it in its original appearance in The Atlantic in June 2008 while stranded in the Springfield-Branson National Airport. I had missed my flight on the way to serve as a guest of honor at Mo*Con III in Indianapolis, and while waiting for the later flight that I had managed to secure, I discovered Carr’s essay while browsing an airport newsstand. When I sat down in the terminal and began reading it, I quickly forgot about my travel delay as the opening words jolted me with a sense of self-recognition:

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. 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. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

These paragraphs were dazzling because they articulated my own experience with uncanny precision. Then Carr’s further words, in which he explained that he had identified the likely culprit in this attack on his ability to read and concentrate deeply, further articulated what had been my recently growing suspicion:

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Reading this was a pivotal moment in my relationship with the internet, as it gave lucid voice to my own personal intimations of encroaching ruin.

Somehow, it is now eighteen years later, and I’m still negotiating the tension between online engagement and deep concentration and absorption as both a writer and a reader.