Photo by dospaz via Flickr.com
In November 2007, Amazon introduced its new product: the Kindle, an e-book reader that allowed downloading of not only books, but newspapers, magazines and other documents. A few years later, Apple released the iPad, and the rest, they say, is history.
What few people knew then was how big an indicator sales of this technology would affect the ability of future generations to read. The Washington Post recently published an article saying the Internet and all of its various branches have pretty much ruined the wiring in the new generation’s brains.
Our brains have adapted to the lights and distractions that readings on the Internet present to us. It is now more difficult to even get one paragraph into a reading not on a screen. We’re used to being able to easily Google a term or person we are unfamiliar with instead of trying to use the context clues and previous knowledge to figure it out. And once we’re done answering our question of who or what this article is talking about, we jump from one subject to a related one and on and on. It’s practically a miracle if someone goes back to finish the article that started our entire escapade.
Even if we are one of the rare cases where we return to the article we originally were reading, the chances of us actually and thoroughly reading it are slim. Much like the graders of standardized tests, readers skim the article, looking for key words and phrases that will give them gist of the story. More often than not, they need to reread sentences multiple times. That way, they can fool themselves and those less intelligent than them into thinking they are updated on current events or ideas.
And most times that works. But the underlying truth is that we are changing our habits unintentionally and unconsciously. Not only is this is bad in terms of reading and taking in information, but the long-term consequences are just beginning to become evident. Our ability to focus on a single article without clicking out or Googling or watching a video is kind of a telling tale of our generation’s attention spans. We’re so easily distracted by objects that promise to prove more enjoyable or engage more of the senses, and in being attentive to these sources, we lose the ability to get the facts and figures that are actually more interesting and important.
Sure, technology and the Internet have vastly improved our lives. We can stay in touch with friends and family who don’t live down the street. We can shop for our Christmas presents from the comfort of our bed. We can share stories and pictures and endless other things with strangers from halfway around the world.
But it has ruined us just as equally. I can’t tell you the last time I finished even a chapter in a printed book, nor can I tell you the last time I actually used my course textbooks and not Google to help me with my homework. But I can immediately tell you the last time I was so easily distracted by the Internet: it was less than 20 minutes ago when I was trying to find the date the Kindle was released, and I somehow ended up looking at the DVD Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
It’s not like I was trying to get to that point in some weird version of a Wiki-race: it just happened. And, try as I might to stop it, my brain is wired that way now. Future generations are going to have to either suffer the consequences of our faults, or we can, slowly but surely, retrain our brains to read the linear method we were taught as kids.