Is Goodle Making us Stupid?

[isabelleballard]

In a time where worlds of information are stored on the internet, one rarely has to open a book. The way that we read is changing. The author of the article wrote, “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” It is harder for people who read online to read long sections of than people who only read print articles and books. Online, people receive little spurts of information as they skim through titles and paragraphs. This type of reading is different from the traditional reading where one becomes immersed in a book or long article.
This new type of reading is not as indulgent and requires a different thought process entirely. Now one is no longer required to pay attention when he or she reads and absorbs knowledge. The whole concept has changed. “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
Though reading online is preferable to watching television, we have to be careful not to lose touch with books. Absorbing information quickly by skimming the surface is a useful skill, but it cannot replace reading full pages. “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.” We need to be able to compromise, to have it both ways. We not only need to be able to read and comprehend long blocks of text, but also need to be able to skim titles and paragraphs, so that we can both read books and surf the web. Learning to adapt is necessary in an age where the way we receive information is constantly changing

[maxwellsearcy]

I thoroughly agree with you on this one, Isabelle. The solution to the "problem" of Google isn't to choose one over the other or to curtail our internet addictions; the solution is to evolve both of our reading patterns, and I think the evidence says that's the way we're headed. Countless studies have shown that, despite the tendency of texters and internet typers to abbreviate words, misuse word forms, and bastardize the English language in general, texting, reading and typing improve overall literacy. The long and the short of the situation is that reading- whether its poorly written internet rantage or Joyce- is good for your brain, and texting and the internet have forced us to read like never before. We are shifting from the phone addicted teenagers to the text addicted teenagers, and adults are complaining about us reading all of the time! All in all, "reading" through seven NPR articles and scanning a few RSS feeds on my phone doesn't keep me from picking up my copy of Macbeth and going to work on literature with some real substance.

[nathanjohnson]

I hate to be a sycophant, but I have to agree with Isabelle. The way we read is changing. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Well, that is to be determined. But we may be able to find a solution to our lack of a solution and truly find the “compromise” that Isabelle talks about.
Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article, is probably of an older generation. Needless to say, he did not grow up in a time when he was submerged in technology. Rather, the “old” way of reading was still prevalent; he sat down with a book – not a Kindle – and read from a page. Nowadays, we sit at a desk and read from a screen. The information age has had no middle child. There was such a short generation of teenagers that grew into technology. Rather, we now have an older generation who was not accustomed to this technology as a child, and the younger generation who has be plunged into technology and neither one of them knows exactly what to make of it, or how to use it. What we need to do is have constant discourse between the two groups so that we can find this true “compromise.”