Robots are eating my brain. Actually, it's just even more reasons why I hate computers, but I thought I should give it a flamboyant title. I hate myself.

I have media-induced concentration span diminution. I spend my days in semi-lucidity, never pursuing a thought to any logical conclusion, and staring into space whilst vague images flit in and out of my unfocussed mind, as the pictures from the television reach, but never quite converge on the retina of, my unfocussed eyes. It’s all my own fault. Well, mostly.

My first action in reversing this brain atrophy, which began when I finished my degree, should be to foreswear the internet. The internet serves in many ways to make its miss-users thick. Not that long ago, only a couple of years, in fact, I would have instinctively gone to the bookshelves to find something out. This took longer, but I have always prided myself on the efficacy of my book-research, and had got it down to an art form. Nobody could ever describe a Google search as ‘art’.

Books have several obvious advantages over the internet. Their reliability is infinitely easier to judge than that of a website. Their pigment has a more pleasing and indelible effect on the mind than the transitory pixels of light which assault the brain for milliseconds, before being disposed of in the space/time continuum. You can never step into the same bit of internet twice, but books are there until the dust mites get them. If you write a rude comment in a library book in pen, you can’t just calm down, sober up, and delete it the next day.

The very act of trawling through a book in search of an elusive fact leads to sidetracking, lateral shifts, cross-referencing initially non-pertinent subjects, and general enhancement of the thought process and intellectual curiosity. Whereas looking something up on the internet will most likely end in a frankly juvenile pursuit of the stupidest common searches Google users make which are alphabetically similar to the one being performed – you all know what I mean – or just plain getting distracted by something of no use to one’s research whatsoever. I will demonstrate by taking an entirely random example. Let’s say I want to find out about The Black Hole of Calcutta. After typing only two words, Google suggests that I may be looking for information on The Black Crowes. At this point I probably remember a Black Crowes song I once quite liked, but would, and should, have never given a second thought to, had I been looking in a PROPER BOOK. I will then spend the rest of the day in some kind of Youtube 80s rock nostalgia-fest, culminating in the purchase of a highly priced genuine period Quireboys t shirt from Ebay.

The attempted acquisition of facts from the internet is like Odysseus’s half-remembrance that he probably had some kind of boring thing to get back to which didn’t involve all this lovely lotus-eating. Information from the internet, quickly attained, is also quickly forgotten. (As a side note, I should point out that when double checking that it was Odysseus and not Jason who met the Lotus Eaters, I was inadvertently reminded by Wiki of 80s band The Lotus Eaters, who once had a song I quite liked. I resisted the siren lure.)

On the subject of forgetting, I would like to express dismay at my complete inability to spell these days. If writing by hand, I can still muster up a coherent and syntactically correct sentence. I imagine. But since I haven’t written at any length by hand for six months, I can’t be sure. I was a late adopter of typing straight on to the computer. For over a year of my degree, I wrote my essays by hand, before typing them up. It was only laziness, and a natural love of leaving things until the last minute, which forced me to try my hand at this typing as I went along business. At first I used Microsoft Word only as a word processor – the type available when I sort of learned to use a computer in about 1995 (though it’s now occurred to me that I only passed that course due to a friend doing my coursework for me – you know who you are). I barely conceived of such science fiction capabilities as ‘look up’, ‘synonyms’, or ‘copy and paste’. So I continued to type with a paper thesaurus and dictionary to hand, in anticipation of the inevitable event of my inability to remember a word. It took longer, but was more intellectually stimulating, and the end result was often the retrieval of a more appropriate or apposite word.

Grammar and spelling have been rendered unknowable, rather than being clarified by Word. I know that the green line is trying to tell me something, but I sure as heck don’t know what. Neither does its programmer, I’d wager. The red line mostly provides an excellent service. Apart from its not knowing really obvious proper nouns, and plenty of perfectly correct other words, I appreciate its informing me of my errors. What I do not like is when it doesn’t tell me of my errors. By this I mean the auto-correction of words only slightly misspelt, where there is only one realistic alternative available, the one clearly being striven for by the scrivener. Consistently spell "either", "iether", and you won’t find out about it unless you watch the screen as you type.

My reliance on spell-check has left me a spelling neurotic. I second guess my every word. A sentence I could have confidently written at the age of twelve becomes a minefield of fear. I spend minutes floundering around on Facebook, attempting to compose the simplest status update without the aid of spell-check. I have made this worse for myself by my semi-ironic insistence on pedantically correcting the grammar, spelling, or punctuation of former classmates in their messages/comments. Semi-irony is notoriously difficult to convey via Facebook. Tthe upshot of this is that I now have to be extra vigilant, so as not to leave myself open to syntactic and grammatical mockery. Which is the worst kind of mockery, you know.

I will conclude with a point which my sister would no doubt contend makes me “sound like an old person”. People cannot spell anymore. I’m sure schools still teach that it’s “i” before “e” except after “c” (oh, except not in “their”, they never told me that, and it floored me for years), but as soon as people leave education, and they no longer have need of spelling rules, they forget them. I have difficulty figuring out when to use effect and affect. It’s been explained to me, and I remember in theory that one is a verb and one is a noun, but to my confused and illogical mind, both words seem a bit too abstract to be either. Instead of making a concerted effort to straighten this quandary out in my shrivelled brain, I instead take a stab in the dark, and trustingly rely on Word do the rest. Likewise, homophones, such as stationary and stationery. At one time I would have made up some mnemonic, such as thinking that the “e” in “stationery” looks a bit like a paperclip (yes, I know it doesn’t really, but bear with me, I’m trying to make a point), to aid remembering. Nowadays I wouldn’t bother, and neither would anybody else. Because it’s not necessary to remember anything anymore. Retain something in your head for the time it takes to enter it into the computer, then empty it out of your brain. Because logically, isn’t this freeing up more space for more information, like emptying the Recycle Bin?

Coming up next time, Sky TV, because I’ve nowhere near finished yet!