Take for example a recent poll by the Pew Research Center which found that Fox News Viewers are far more likely to believe the “Death Panel Myth.” Forty percent of Fox viewers believed that the government health plan would decide whether or not the elderly would be allowed to live, compare this to MSNBC viewers, who only 27% of whom were likely to believe the “Death Panel Myth.”

Now we could assign this to the networks, placing blame at the foot of Fox News, but we can also see how this is representative of a larger problem: audience fragmentation. That is, if I am conservative and agree with Limbaugh, Hannity, etc. I am more likely to watch Fox. And if I am a liberal I am more likely to watch MSNBC where I can watch Maddow. This means that I am likely to watch a network that shares my views rather than a network which presents views contrary to mine, or even say views that represent a middle/common ground.

The result is that when any two individuals get together they are likely to actually hold not just two different opinions on any matter, but actually two different sets of facts on which they would base such opinions. In other words they would have no common ground from which to draw in order to have a conversation about health care. This is in part what Keen is talking about when he references the echo chamber, and multiple this by ones entire cultural references and one comes to understand how there any two individuals are increasingly likely to not share the same cultural references, whether this is in the news, or art, or entertainment.

But here is the catch. Keen places the blame here at the foot of the internet. See the internet causes fragmentation, and hence death of our common culture. But as the above example shows, there is nothing here that is specifically about the internet. This is about cable news. Indeed audience fragmentation began before the rise of the internet with cable channels and conservative talk shows. So while there might be audience fragmentation, the internet is not the cause of this fragmentation, indeed it is only part of a changing media ecology. Sure conservatives visit Red State, and Liberals visit Daily Kos, but this is also true with respect to MSNBC and FOX. By limiting his critique to the internet and casting broad strokes, Keen misses this important, and crucial nuance.

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.

Now there is a lot to think about both in Carr’s argument and in this recent study, particularly about the way that technology shapes/reshapes the way we think, but what concerns me in both pieces is the assumption that there is a “natural” way to read or process. Carr says, “the deep reading that used to come naturally.” Of course this reading was not natural, anything but. Presumably Carr had to learn to “deep read” through years of practice. Now, I’m not saying that deep reading is bad, or that we shouldn’t do it, anything but. Deep reading has its advantages, but it also has its limits, same goes for scanning. But to treat one as natural and the other as unnatural is to privilege one at the expense of the other, rather than analyzing each on its own terms. Deep reading is a historically developed reading practice, not an intrinsic naturally good method of knowledge acquisition, one which might have to be adapted to manage the changing media landscape.