June 12, 2008
Is The Web Making Us Stupid?
The cover article in the current Atlantic magazine tries to describe what the Internet is doing to our brains. It argues that our increasing reliance on Internet technology seems to be chipping away at our capacity for concentration and contemplation. The author, Nicholas Carr, writes that "my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles" and the more we use the Web,the harder it is to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
There are studies that have been conducted to evaluate how Internet use affects cognition with a recently published study conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that are in the midst of a change in the way we read and think. "As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they would save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.
The author then cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University who states that 'the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts efficiency and immediacy above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. ' She points out that reading is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
So we can expect that our learning styles and experiences will continue to morph in ways that we have yet to discover and study.
Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research
(University College London)
Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (pdf)
Maryanne Wolf, Tufts University
Posted by rsk at June 12, 2008 09:22 AM