Here is what I have found, rather interesting to give though to
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 my 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”, “can be an enormous boon to thinking”. But that boon comes at a price. 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 sky.
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, content pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more than today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of thinking- perhaps even a new sense of the self. We are not only what we read, we are how we read. The style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing process, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information”. Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
The Net isn’t the alphabet, and it can never replace the printing press. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, and foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as has been argued, is distinguishable, from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content”, we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. As we are drained of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, we risk turning into “pancake people”- spread wide and thin as we are connected with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Source: Adapted from “Is Google making us stupid?”
