It seems that I fit all descriptions of people using web reading mentioned in this article, fidgety, hard to concentrate, no deep reading and lose patience. I asked several classmates. One told me that she lost the desire of reading after noticing the article's length is over 3 screens. Therefore, I am not the only person freaked out by this article ;)
I do not agree with Google is making us stupid but I'm sure the internet-based reading is shifting our demands.
As technology and internet emerges, people adopt more convenient reading format other than traditional books.
Traditional books have advantages compared to e-books. To my perspective, traditional books indeed help people to do deep reading, providing space for mental connection and in-depth thinking. Sometimes a fascinating book makes me eager to finish reading at one time, forgetting eating and sleeping. However, it is hard to find this kind of feeling when I do e-reading. My thought can be dispersed by any other net tool other than Google, such as Facebook or Twitter. I used to refresh them every hour when I sit in front of my computer, which makes my reading not consistently, leading to shallow understanding. Most times when I do e-reading, I jumped from link to link and gave up after 2-4 paragraph scratching if I find I lost the interest to this article. In addition, reading too much reviews and commends by others shapes my mind.
However, I have to admit that an unbeatable advantage of e-reading is that it posed me to sufficient bunches of information, which brings me super convenience and wider updated knowledge. I can access to abundant updated news daily on political, economics, entertainment and whatever. I can do research on whatever I didn't seen before. Moreover, selective reading saves my time and makes my reading more efficiency. Google widen my knowledge coverage. I view myself smarter and more trendy with internet-based reading.
All in all, internet-based reading is the result catering to public's demand. As the speed of the society increases and competition intensifies, people are willing to gather as much information as possible in fastest pace, most convenient format and cheapest cost.
Google is not making us stupid but making us more fidgety and ambitous.
Article: "Is Google making us stupid" by Nicholas Carr
I like that you picked an angle to compare traditional reading with e-reading. In my point of view, I also prefer traditional reading. That is why I always like to print my electronic text books out to read them. In terms of Google, I still have some reserved opinions about it stopping us thinking actively as we used to be.
ReplyDelete“Google is not making us stupid but making us more fidgety and ambitious.”
ReplyDeleteThat's true. Everytime I sit in front of the desk and search the internet, I open several websites and tell myself I wanna more information and more, but in the end, I just got nothing or little useful information which makes me fidgety and greedy.
Internent has changed our life styles. BUT we cannot control and stop it!
I really laughed out when I read your first paragraph. :)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, you are right. Most of my friend( include me of course) said they like to read real book rather than just stared at screen. Real book can help them to find the reading feeling.
Moreover, I do agree with you that too many info is also a key problem to low- efficient. When people reading paper, they may distract by other social websites. I think most of us have this problem and cannot solve it although we really want to.
I also felt fed up when finding so many pages for this article, and even think that "how could an author who knows people can't read long article come up with so long an article".
ReplyDeleteAnd then when reading your post, I further my thought. I think almost all of us agree that there are both good sides and bad sides of the Internet and it depends on us to decide how to use it. But you post inspires me to think about what writers could do to keep readers focused? Now that writers can't change the trend or kill the Internet/computer, I think it's time for them to make their articles more readable and interesting.
-Xiaoting Wang
Iris,
ReplyDeleteI really like your way of considering a problem. Your way to state your point by using paper book and e-book example really brings me into the analysis. I also like the actions you take when facing problems. Instead of complaining how Google makes us stupid or not, your focus on how to adapt yourself to stand out from the crowd is very impressive. The point is how to make us smarter than Google. Google is just a tool but some people are dominated by Google in an unnoticed way. What we need to do is to keep the employer position but not employee.