Reading and the Internet

An interesting article discusses a new book called “The Shallows”, whose thesis is that the Internet has altered our brain, in a bad way.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/20/internet-altering-your-mind?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

The author, Nicholas Carr has previously written an article on Atlantics accusing Google (and the Internet bandwagon) of making it stupid. The main argument that occurs again in the book is that reading in the Internet induces multitasking - which is not necessarily a good thing - and content skimming.

With regards to the latter, it can be seen that Carr is a strong advocate for the idea of “slow reading”, i.e. reading books, the old ways. Slow reading, I agree, brings out the contemplative, reflective thinking of the readers. It roughly says that by immersing oneself, spending days of reading one book, the chance is high that one would stop and a moment to think, to relate and find connections with real life, or just simply appreciate the writing, the plot, the art being delivered by the text. A premise of slow reading is total concentration, total immersion with the book. One could imagine the act of slow reading is a continuous line of thought over a period of time. This is a stark contrast to the typical way people do Internet reading over the same period of time, which could be describe as ad-hoc, discontinuous, segmented lines of thought.

How do we read in the Internet? We mostly do our reading on the web. Beside it being unnatural for the eyes, we would never *just* read. We multitask, we listen to music, we check out pop up links, we check emails, facebook, twitter, ... and the list keeps going longer. Sadly, reading has become merely one of those task, and I feel chills down on my spine when thinking about the possibility that reading becoming a secondary task, i.e. we just happen to read while doing something else.

I am not jumping to the conclusion that the age of Internet reading is bad for the future generations, or even for us. First, it is currently impossible for science to quantify what are good and what are bad for our children. Second, the debates on the effect of the information age on our culture are still going strongly, with people from both camps refuse to come to a consensus. In the art camps, authors like Carr start using scientific evidence demonstrating the change in our brain structure as we get exposed to the Internet. Such the result is interesting, but merely for scientific interest, and scientists cannot say if the changes are bad or good. The wise men used to say that science only provides evidence and facts, not opinions. In the science camps, cognitive or neural scientists
usually claim the long-term benefit of online, role-playing games to children. In the contrary to the common thinking that video games are bad for children, those role-playing games enforce children to learn and practice good social behavior, improve their communication skills, and allow them to explore the possibilities that their parents’ generation did not have. As scientists are still struggling to quantify the effects of technologies on the youth, there certainly are strong evidence supporting the thesis that growing up with technology is a good thing for children.

Finally, my personal take on this is not to blame the technology, which by its nature has bad sides and good sides. It’s up to us to decide how to make the best of them. As a result, parents, teachers and politicians play important roles in shaping our future. As for reading, I consider myself lucky for being born before the Internet, to be able to observe and get the best of both worlds. I use the Internet to skim around ideas and topics I don’t know about. I use the Internet to find scientific articles at the speed unimaginable just more than one decade ago. However, text books, article print-outs and non-fictions are still the main resource for studying. I’m still building up my collection of novels, still indulging myself in the minds of the novelist, in the imaginary worlds full of fantastic charaters, in the emotions brought by the books - those that are unreachable by technology.