Thoughts on a Paper, Episode III

Hello, Slaves to the Internet!

First of all, a couple of house cleaning things. One, I apologize for not posting the last couple of days. I've been really busy. Hopefully I'll have less homework this week. Secondly, I realize now (a week too late) that I neglected to provide a link in Episode I. Here's the link:

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

OK. Now to business.

I've spent the last two and a half hours doing research for this paper. I'll give you a quick run-down of the sources and what I've learned.

First of all, the article that rox my sox. Is Google Making Us Stupid, by Nicholas Carr. Carr wrote this article for The Atlantic when he realized that his attention span-- especially when he's reading a long book or poem-- is totally shot. He blames it on the Internet. Carr raises some interesting questions, ones that I hope to answer over the next... good gosh, two months!

• Do hyperlinks drive us to other sites, keeping us from finishing the current thought?
• Do students go online to avoid having to "read in the traditional sense" for research projects? (I know I do!)
• Maryanne Wolf says "We are how we read". If we are what we eat, have we become consumers of knowledge? Is information now a commodity?
• When Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter because he was going blind his writing changed. His writing style changed dramatically, and he stated that "our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts". Do we think in txt mssge and iChat speak?
• Lastly, Carr points out that data mining companies like Google and Yahoo! benefit from our jumping from site to site (it's how they make money. The longer we read one article, the more money they loose). Does that mean that our decrease in attention span is intentional?

In an article called Appetite for Distraction, Angelica Candelaria pointed out that the change in the way we think is reflected in modern cinema (something I'm very interested in). Movies no longer have in-depth character development, instead focusing on pretty visual effects and complex action sequences. American Theaters no longer host foreign films, because we don't have the patience to read subtitles.

Candelaria is the first so far to give possible solutions. She mentions that you should decrease your overall time on the internet, and when you are doing research, you should print out lengthy articles and read them off-line (something I'm doing with this project). She also gives some rather odd solutions, such as improving your diet and practice memory games to increase your memory, but she does raise some good points.

Turning into Digital Goldfish, from BBC News Online, doesn't have a whole lot, but it does have an interesting factoid: You spend an average of less than 60 seconds per website when you're browsing. Scary, huh?

Is TV Evil?, by Kevin Drum, is more of a rant than anything else, does have an interesting anecdote. The author's mother was a fourth grade teacher, and she found that when she first started teaching in the 1970s, the average attention span for a 4th grader was about 30 minutes. Any longer and the kids would get distracted. When the article was published, the average attention span had dropped to under 15 minutes.

Lastly, Informing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, the same dude who came up with the concept of Future Schlack, has some really interesting facts in it. Did you know that in America there are...

• 2.6 x 10⁵ billboards
• 11,520 newspapers
• 11,556 periodicals
• 27 x 10⁴ video stores
• 3.62 x 10⁸ TV sets
• 4 x 10⁸ radios
• 4 x 10⁴ books published every year (3 x 10⁵ world-wide)
• 6 x 10¹⁰ pieces of advertising-oriented junk mail sent per day?(just for reference, that's almost ten times the population of Earth!)

Good golly, Miss Molly!