I’ve written a number of posts over time both here and at Leadership Turn about how turning off, unwiring and giving yourself the freedom and time to think—letting your mind wander freely—will juice innovation and spark productivity.

When most everyone you know is wired to the hilt and acts as if their world will end if any little wire goes astray you start to feel like a fish looking for water in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

But it turns out that I’m not alone in my concerns that the Net is dumbing us down and innovation is being killed by constant noise.

Yesterday, Soul Shelter posed the question, “What if the Internet poses a threat to the cultivation of a rich, reflective inner life? What if Internet-mentality endangers Art—its creation, its place in our culture, and our ability to appreciate it?—or the cultivation of real knowledge?” and reviewed these books.

• Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel;
• The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts; and
• The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman.

The review also mentions Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future and an article by Nicholas Carr in the July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly, Is Google Making us Stoopid? with the subtitle: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains .

Pick up any of the books; click the link to read the Atlantic article; at the very least read Soul Shelter.

Then, if your brain can still focus and think, consider the real truths that are presented.

How wired are you?

Image credit: Angel-13 CC license