Coming soon, and has the Internet made you stupid?
I thought it would be unfair to spend last week blogging about all the other presenters at WORLDCOMP’08 and OMMA Behavioral without sharing my own presentation with you! So I’ve recorded it, and I’m putting it together with the slide show so you can share in the love. Expect the video sometime tomorrow.
In the meantime, I’d like you to enjoy a delightful piece from Nicholas Carr at The Atlantic called, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas has written a long article about our growing inability to consume long articles.
Here is one of the many passages that should rekindle your ability to ponder:
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.
I too read less. These days, when I am inclined to pick up a “book” (a strange device with physical pages and black ink), I lean more towards Grisham than Goethe. I find that I have to force myself to read the sort of non-fiction that keeps my mind sharp and my thinking fresh.
So in the interest of keeping this post at a length commensurate with our newly shortened attention spans, I’ll stop here and turn it over to you. Have you found your thought processes changing with the use of the Interweb? Are you more in the market for ‘War and Peace’ or ‘Dilbert’? In short, has the Internet made you stupid?
November 30th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Slowly and gradually, internet is making our life moer and more comfortable as well as less creative. We just rely on the data given in the site without finding the reliability of the source.
November 30th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for your comment. It may be true. On the other hand, just this morning I happened to be reading an unrelated article that may be relevant here.
The article, by Suzanne Seggerman at the Huffington Post, was on the power of video games to effect change in society. She mentions that only a small fraction of games are violent, but “(g)ames have been demonized in part because they are simply a young medium growing up. Note Voltaire: ‘The multitude of books is making us ignorant.’”
Couldn’t the same be said for the Internet?
February 24th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Hi, I just read this and had an AHA! moment - all my life I have been a maniacal and constant reader. But I’ve noticed that for the past 3-4 years I have lost interest in reading books (though my house is full of them). I do spend hours on the computer, though, much of it in mindless fun like reading jokes and watching pictures of the Great Wall and ice sculptures that people send me. But it seems like what I’ve done is replace book reading with e-mail and Internet reading. Hm. Is that bad? Is it OK? From the information in “The Alphabet and the Goddess,” by Leonard Shlain, it seems that book reading stimulates the left brain, the intellect, the linear thinking; while the images on the Internet stimulate the right brain, the artistic, the wholistic thinking. Maybe the Internet is making us more creative, but we haven’t noticed yet.
It may not be so bad a thing, after all. Just different.