I can feel it, too. 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.
September 15, 2009
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This artcle echoes many of my own concerns about my own reading habits. At least the parts of it that I skimmed over anyway.
ReplyDeleteLOL! That ol' Slim wit!
ReplyDeletei havent managed to finish a book on the iphone yet...
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, I'm not sure the way we process information now is such a bad thing. As fulfilling as reading a book may be, it's hardly the most efficient use of our time, both for entertainment and educational purposes. I've read countless history books that could've got their point across in 1/10th of the time the took.
ReplyDeleteThe danger here is in the way we think about what we read now. It's the darting from one topic to another in rapid succession. With books, we're forced to take our time and really think critically about what we've read. We're able to formulate our own opinions much more clearly. The rapid-fire data of the internet leaves us vulnerable. Not only do we not think in depth about what we've read, we're left dangerously exposed to the bias of whoever wrote it. If you ask me, that's why there is such as a stark ideological divide in America today. How do you get perspective when everyone in your online community is beating the same drum?
I think #1 on my list of reasons for becoming a social studies teachers is that I want to get kids to think for themselves. This means training them how to think critically in an age of rapid information. In fact, teachers are encouraged to embrace new technology at every turn. We're already incorporating blogs, wikis, and twitter in clasrooms. My challenge is to teach these kids how to process all this data to make meaningful connections.
I'm not even sure I can do that myself.