This is some­thing I worry about: As most of us spend less time in front of books (and each other) and more time in front of com­put­ers, are we grad­u­ally train­ing our­selves to read computer-speak more eas­ily than printed lan­guage? Many of us are now more com­fort­able engag­ing with web page, PDFs, menus, links and lists than we are with those pre-compiled and edited, clunky phys­i­cal con­trap­tions we call books. I notice myself read­ing offline less and less, and I worry about what that says for my mind and the nature of my thinking.

I sup­pose that’s why I was inter­ested in Nicholas Carr’s recent arti­cle “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. He makes a sim­i­lar con­fes­sion, although, despite much ram­bling and spec­u­la­tion, doesn’t arrive at any help­ful con­clu­sions to help us explain this shift.

Motoko Rich has a related arti­cle in today’s Times, “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?,” which scar­ily illus­trates how today’s teenagers with Internet access may never read an actual book. Until this morn­ing, I had only wor­ried about my generation--I remem­ber being so engrossed in read­ing as a child that my par­ents would have to put a hand between my eyes and the page in order to get my attention--but now we see the first gen­er­a­tion that will live their entire lives with high-speed net access. I was born “unplugged,” and opted in at my own voli­tion. But these kids were born plugged in, and they may never know life any other way.

So in 20, 30 years, when these kids are our lead­ers, debaters, thinkers, pol­icy mak­ers and care­tak­ers, what and how will they be thinking?