Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
so i was on vacation for a good 9 days last week, and i completely avoided computers. i found myself calming down, relaxing, taking it easy, and feeling unhurried and unrushed. these are all things that should happen on a vacation. but i also discovered myself doing something i haven't done in a while: reading a novel. i had chalked up my recent non-reading to the fact that my job has been very intense for the past year or so as i've been working very long hours and taken on a boatload of new responsibility. i've tried to pick up a book here and there but have lost interest after a short while. again, i thought this was all due to fatigue, and that were i to get a break, i'd get back into my old reading habits -- i'm a Lit major and a one-time voracious reader (going back to early childhood). and so i got my break, first one in a long while, and i did indeed slip back into the world of the novel. was it the break from life? or was it the break from the internet?
an article from The Atlantic:
[q]Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now 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.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
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’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” [/q]
and what's funny? i haven't read the whole thing yet. the article (posted on a blog) caught my attention, i assumed i knew about what the conclusions would be, and i felt like it might make for an interesting thread on FYM. so, boom, i rushed to post it because i'm most curious not about the content, but to the reactions to the content that this article (probably skimmed by all those who may reply) would engender.
is that bad?
are we thinking differently? in some ways, i feel as if the internet has improved may skills ... i feel as if i'm writing as well as ever, perhaps better due to the snappy, quick, no-fat, no-bullshit writing that posting requires, and i'm able to expose myslef to a wide variety of thought and writing styles that in turn (positively) affect my own. today i was reading through Augusten Borrough's blog, and was marveling at his wildly creative descriptions of being on a book tour in Canada. i find that i'm able to discuss things with people -- online or off -- in as much detail as ever, but i have noticed a decline in my ability to slide into longer, deeper, more time consuming articles on the web.
i just don't read the way i once did.
anyone else notice this? what are the effects? what are the internets doing to us? is this good or bad? or just different? how do we react to a tool that might fundamentally be altering the way we absorb information?
i also wonder if some of this doesn't tie into what many have understood as The Decline of FYM. yes, 4-5 years ago, this place was different. not so much in level of civility, as i understand it, but in the time and care people would take to post articles, more like they were writing mini-essays instead of quick, sharp points of point and counterpoint. could it be that we have all been affected by The Google and the Internets? are we thinking differently? are we not so much responsible for the decline of discourse (if we can agree that it is a decline at all) and more victims of it?
have you read this far?
an article from The Atlantic:
[q]Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now 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.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
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’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” [/q]
and what's funny? i haven't read the whole thing yet. the article (posted on a blog) caught my attention, i assumed i knew about what the conclusions would be, and i felt like it might make for an interesting thread on FYM. so, boom, i rushed to post it because i'm most curious not about the content, but to the reactions to the content that this article (probably skimmed by all those who may reply) would engender.
is that bad?
are we thinking differently? in some ways, i feel as if the internet has improved may skills ... i feel as if i'm writing as well as ever, perhaps better due to the snappy, quick, no-fat, no-bullshit writing that posting requires, and i'm able to expose myslef to a wide variety of thought and writing styles that in turn (positively) affect my own. today i was reading through Augusten Borrough's blog, and was marveling at his wildly creative descriptions of being on a book tour in Canada. i find that i'm able to discuss things with people -- online or off -- in as much detail as ever, but i have noticed a decline in my ability to slide into longer, deeper, more time consuming articles on the web.
i just don't read the way i once did.
anyone else notice this? what are the effects? what are the internets doing to us? is this good or bad? or just different? how do we react to a tool that might fundamentally be altering the way we absorb information?
i also wonder if some of this doesn't tie into what many have understood as The Decline of FYM. yes, 4-5 years ago, this place was different. not so much in level of civility, as i understand it, but in the time and care people would take to post articles, more like they were writing mini-essays instead of quick, sharp points of point and counterpoint. could it be that we have all been affected by The Google and the Internets? are we thinking differently? are we not so much responsible for the decline of discourse (if we can agree that it is a decline at all) and more victims of it?
have you read this far?