These are being replaced by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts – the faster the better.Įver since Guttenberg’s printing press, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science and society. We seem to have arrived at an important juncture in our cultural history – we are trading away our old linear thought process, calm focused and undistracted.
This transformation is profound, and so are its likely impacts. It truly appears that the net is changing the way we absorb information.Įven though there are different degrees of net usage, what is clear is that for society as a whole, the net has become the communication and information medium of choice… we have embraced its uniquely rapid-fire mode of collecting and dispensing information. Others believe the net has made books superfluous.Ī research study by nGenera which interviewed six thousand members of what it called ‘Generation net’ found that young people don’t even read a page from left to right or top to bottom, they skip around, scanning it for areas of interest. Phillip Davis (among many others) points to the advantages of ‘skimming’ lots of articles – believing it makes us more efficient and creative than the older linear ways of reading and thinking. For example, Bruce Friedman who blogs about the use of computers points out that he skim-reads even short blog posts and his thinking has taken on a ‘staccato’ quality. He is not the only one who believes that the internet is changing the way he thinks: friends have made similar observations as have various bloggers.
Now he zips along the surface like a guy on a Jet-Ski. McLuhan noted that media shape process of thought as well as supplying us with material to think about, and Carr thinks that the net is chipping away at his ability to concentrate and contemplate… Once he was like a scuba diver in a sea of words. He also recognises that skim-reading short snippets of lots of articles probably makes us more creative, as this encourages us to make a greater diversity of linkages between different information sets. He notes that there are positives to the internet – having so much information to hand is very convenient and means we can think and work more efficiently. He notes that ‘the Net has become my all-purpose medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind’ (hardly surprising giving the sheer amount of ‘functions’ that are now facilitated online!) He believes this is because he spends a lot of time online, surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the net. Deep reading used to be easy, now it’s a struggle. He says that he used to find it easy to immerse himself in a book, but that’s rarely the case anymore… his concentration drifts after a page or two and he starts looking for something else to do.
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