After reading, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?, I have to completely agree with Mr. Carr. I never realized it until I read the article but I totally feel the same way. The custom that I used to have while reading was to sit down with a book and read a hefty amount of pages on one sitting. But as I’ve grown older and started using the internet more, I find myself skimming rather than actual reading. I love the metaphor he uses, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” This is clearly evident in my life. I look for immediate gratification, keywords, statistics, main ideas, but I rarely find myself diving into the work and actually searching for the reasoning and the encompassing beauty that is hidden and woven between the lines.
This has led definitely led us to a new way of thinking. We have become a society that needs immediacy to survive. Our brains have transformed from a tour bus, where examining every detail was the norm, to a 747 flying over the air, where gazing over monumental ideas is the norm. And this is detrimental to humans. We need to learn how concentrate again, we need to reform our brain processes before it’s too late.
If we continue down this path, our kids are going to expect every main idea and every thesis to be clearly in front of them. They will never obtain the patience or effort to actually understand the supporting facts, which is arguably the meat of an article. It’s fine to start off with the salad or soup but that’s not the main course, they (by which I mean us) have to be able to dive into a work and force the brain to examine for the sake of literary.
It’s not too late to change though. Like the article states, our brain are still like plastic and very malleable, so before we continue to surface read works and become a surface level species, let’s do something about it. Who’s joining me as I protest, “death to google?” Truthfully though, awareness is key. If the parents limit the use of the Net, then the brain is more likely to form in a traditional sense, which includes finding meaning in the totality of works, not mere secluded statements.