” 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.”
It’s certainly true. Now that I’m doing some university research again I’ve noticed that I have to constantly resist the temptation to just hit the net and look around to see what’s going on. It is deeply satisfying when you do sit down and read books and articles for hours on end and it gets easier each day. Personally, I think we can straddle both modes of thought but it does require a bit of effort. Probably too many people opt for the immediacy and excitement of the net and that’s problematic long-term.
2 Comments
I totally agree. I daily struggle between the ‘quick fix’ read of wikipedia and google versus the harder, more demanding and draining reading of long-form text.
I too enjoy reading books, but find it increasingly harder to fit into my busy life. Mind you, I’ve had to pick back up my discarded habit of reading my rss feeds because I felt I was getting too far behind. And at least most uni research databases now allow searches to be carried out automatically and the results fed back to you via rss, which helps massively.
I don’t agree with the stupidity part but i agree that it changes the way we think, as you have said, opting for that quick hit of Wik.
I think Lee is correct, the time-poor issue is a greater obstruction than immediate access.
Online materials are useful starting points, esp Wikipedia, but serious time must be given to more traditional consumption of information.