We live in an age of a superabundance of information. Since the advent of the internet, any piece of information is a mere mouseclick away. We don’t even need computers–smart phones have made the internet accessible anywhere to anyone in the first world. However, is this necessarily a good thing? The wealth and immediacy of information, the speed in which we process it, and the manner of learning have all fundamentally changed our lives.
In my regular wanderings around the internet this week (read: not what I was doing to research this, but what I was doing to procrastinate researching this), I found a number of sites complaining of information overload. The first, Charlie Brooker’s weekly column for The Guardian, while not directly internet-related, is nevertheless relevant: in it, he complains that the sheer tonnage of media information available is overwhelming. This is not just due to the increased output of old media, but new ways of accessing it:
“But it wasn’t just the limitations of the media themselves that appealed. This was 30 years ago. Fewer things had been created for them. Every day we humans gleefully churn out yet more books and films and TV shows and videogames and websites and magazine articles and blog posts and emails and text messages, all of it hanging around, competing for attention. Without leaving my seat I can access virtually any piece of music ever recorded, download any film ever made, order any book ever written. And the end result is that I hardly experience any of it. It’s too much. I’ve had it with choice. It makes my head spin.”
Since he now literally owns more DVDs and books than he’ll ever have time to watch or read before he dies, he calls for a “cultural diet”, in which he is told what to read and watch, and when. Because of the superabundance of information, he is capable of taking in less.
A different approach to the subject was brought up on the blog Sociological Images. In the post, the author (Lisa Wade, from Occidental College) marvels at how slow a YouTube video of a documentary from 1938 is. The relevant information doesn’t start until 40 seconds in! The comments to this are interesting. While there are some people saying that they had no problem paying attention whatsoever, many commenters say they got frustrated and eventually just got the information from Wikipedia, which is both faster and denser.
Finally, in the article Is Google Making Us Stupid? July 2008 issue of The Atlantic, author Nicholas Carr talks about how the internet has changed the way he thinks. He noticed that he was no longer able to pay attention to long pieces of writing, often getting bored after a page or two. He found that many of his friends were having the same problem. He argues that while we are doing more reading, it’s not the same:
it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries 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. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Surely the internet has changed things. With the amount, density, and speed in which the internet gives us information, our ways of learning are not the same as they were thirty years ago. However, the question remains: is this a bad thing? And if so, is it possible to change back? I’ll look at these questions in next week’s travelogue. And for the record, I watched two YouTube videos, checked my e-mail four times, bought a dress online, and played about twenty games of Minesweeper while writing this blog.
Possibly Relevant Posts:
- Does greater access to the internet affect attention span? (0) | Sara Hardwick
- Is Google Making Us Stupid?: Who Cares? (6) | Sara Hardwick
- Webcomics and Art Online: Is Comic Book Guy already out of a job? (7) | Elisa Verna
8 Comments
I guess this leaves me wondering again about what this phenomenon means for people who never were reading long prose or books, so haven’t “become stupid” through their use of the internet. Or people who don’t access the internet at all, don’t access it in their native languages, etc. It feels like their is some lurking language of development, civilization, evolution, in these studies about what the internet is doing to “us.” It seems that they don’t often specify who “we” are, but it’s assumed that “we” used to read in one way (newspapers articles, novels, poetry), and now we read in another way (online).
I think that looking at how internet use has changed peoples’ relationships to information intake is really important, but it shouldn’t start from the assumption that everyone has always taken in information in one way, or that those who have not taken in information in that way are somehow not applicable in studies of society.
This makes me think of the Clay Shirky article we had to read for class this week, in which he talks about cognitive and social surplus. I think he’d say tat information overload is the result of a social surplus, and the minesweeper games are the result of your cognitive surplus. But on the other hand, maybe playing minesweeper allows you to organize your subconscious thoughts – rather than filling empty time it’s something you need to do to be more productive later on.
There is a need to look at how people learn differently, and typically we look at it from the perspective of visually vs. auditory vs. hands on vs discovery, and yes there is some extent to which we look at fast learners vs. slower learners. But maybe with new developments we need to look at the latter two more closely. In my own opinion, it seems like the ability to keep up with quick dense information is the way in which our society is going. Rather than sitting down and digesting slowly what we are taking in, we are beginning to be groomed in the art of fast intake, quick deconstruction and analysis, followed by a a fast output. Because of the “ease” of technology, it’s interesting to think about what our children will be required to do with 24 hours to process a school assignment. (I mean just look at what some of us take in and put out at rapid speeds now of 24 hours or less)
Something that is related to this which I’m very interested about is this new form of anxiety that this information overload can give us (though I wonder if people felt like this with the advent of film or television as well).
While the internet has made many areas in life more convenient, there’s this anxious feeling that people often get from living in such an accelerated world. I’ve read half a dozen articles this summer about journalists taking “internet vacations,” and in a general media sense, like Charlie Brooker, falling behind on my Netflix viewing, or not being able to read my favorite blogs for a few days can be added stress to my life. I often wonder if it’s going to be suggested in the near future (perhaps by doctors or psychologists) that like our diet, our media intake should be regulated as well.
You said about Charlie Brooker “because of the superabundance of information, he is capable of taking in less.”
I’m not buying that. Maybe he’s capable of taking in less in terms of the percentage of media available, but there’s no reason that more media equates to consuming less content.
I’ve read the Nicholas Carr piece before, and to a certain extent, I also think it’s a bit contrived. Asking “Is Google making us stupid?” is a little bit like asking “Are video games making us violent?” I agree that the way we’re beginning to process on the internet is short and concise, but this is not really so outside of the internet. There are plenty forums for reading longer pieces. Reading comprehension is a skill, so if you stop reading complete books/journals/essays etc., and you only consume through the blogosphere/internet, of course longer pieces are going to become more difficult to process. It’s sprinting compared to distance running.
This idea reminds me of how Mushon asked us to format our blog posts in class the other week (which, although I agreed, still surprised me). Text cut up by pictures, video, quote blocks, etc. As if this is the proper blogging etiquette that caters towards the short attention spans (who wants to read a big block of text online? Even Wikipedia breaks it up) we’ve adapted while online, even if it is for an academic class.
I had to literally stop reading and giggle to myself when I got the the long quote by Carr. I was quickly skimming and reading in a way that I always do when I read things online. I think an interesting piece of this puzzle is how the internet lets us aggregate information and therefore we expect short bursts of essential information from many sources. On the other hand, I have a different reading style when I read offline. That is why I print out all of my class readings. I feel more comfortable reading long form articles in paper format. So I wonder if the internet propagates a short attention span or rather your attention span is medium specific.
I’m not really sure what feedback I’m supposed to summarize: mostly, everyone was interested in a discussion of whether this was necessarily such a bad thing, which is in the pipeline (not my next post, but the one after).
Also, I totally thought our next posts/comments weren’t due until Sunday, not today. Whoops.