Irreversible Change

I love the internet. Who doesn’t? It allows us to pull vast amounts of information from it in mere seconds. We can learn faster than ever before. But is that such a good thing? This point was brought up in an article I recently read called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. In it, he spoke about how he can not perform the same kinds of “deep reading” that he once was able to do. How his attention wanders very quickly and how he now tends to skim lengthy articles. Carr blames this on the internet, and how it encourages the reader to bounce around, from article to article.

The funny thing is, I noticed this a long time ago. When I was about eleven I realized that I was half way through a book and I didn’t know which character was the main one. At the time, I chalked it up to being tired (it was late) but now I realize the truth. At eleven was about the time that I started to use the internet much more. My school was assigning many of its homework assignments online as well. However, is this such a bad thing? Yes, we may not be digging into what we are reading as much, but at the same time we are still learning it. What would have taken an hour to drive down to the library and find can now be typed into Google and learned in seconds. We may not think about it as much, but we still know it, and learn much more of it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just reflecting the thoughts of the younger generation. I had to notice, did Carr talk to any under twenty’s? Of course not. Why would he? We probably do not have the life experience, in is opinion. However I think he should have gotten some of our opinions just for variety’s sake. After all, the new generation has grown up on the web. Some of us I’m sure have never understood such alien concepts as “deep thought.” Perhaps 50 or so years down the road none of us will even know what that is. When all is said and done, we may all have very different opinions on the subject. But no matter how you look at it, the internet is not going to change. The old days of actually thinking about what we are reading is slowly but surely fading away, whether we want it to or not.