- \n
- TV, video and computer games have lulled our society to sleep.<\/li>\n
- Email, instant messaging, and cell phone texting has lowered our society’s literacy requirements and expectations tremendously. Not only can they not write or spell. Now they don’t have to, and are encouraged not to.<\/li>\n
- It’s promoted an inactive, unhealthy society. Why get up and do anything, when I have the world at my fingertips, and I can “virtually participate”?<\/li>\n
- Be cautious that you don’t turn your mind off. Think about what you see and read, process it, adopt it wisely and promote it with clarity.<\/li>\n
- Be cautious about the amount of time you spend on it. Get up and go do something physically productive!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I’m sure there are more reasons, but the one that troubles me most is the numbing and dumbing aspect. Two books I’ve recommended for quite some time have sounded the warning –\u00a0 Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling<\/a>
by John Taylor Gatto, 1992\u00a0\u00a0 and Endangered Minds<\/a> by Jane Healy, 1990 – both long before the public Internet.<\/p>\n
Today, American Vision’s email addressed this issue, from a bit different angle. Below is a bit of what they said. Read the whole article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Mark Bauerlein is warning about what he describes as the \u201cThe Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future<\/a>
\u201d (2007) [or read his 8 points here<\/a>]<\/span>. Nicholas Carr, writing in July\/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly asks, \u201cIs Google Making Us Stupid?<\/a>\u201d [Don’t miss reading this one!]<\/span> Don\u2019t get me wrong. I love the digital age and what it has done to make gobs of information available in a blink of an eye. It\u2019s unfortunate, however, that many people never learned that there are pitfalls and obstacles in the information business.<\/p>\n
Is the Internet Making Some People Stupid and Gullible?<\/a>
\n– Gary DeMar, July 8, 2008<\/p>\n[my comments in brackets]<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
DeMar notes the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?<\/a>” I clicked the link, since this is a topic of interest to me, and ended up spending more time than a wanted online, reading an unusual-by-its-length article. Carr speaks the things I’ve concluded about this, and below I’ve pasted many quotes from the article that struck me. Read the whole article here<\/a>.:<\/p>\n
…Over the past few years I\u2019ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn\u2019t going\u2014so far as I can tell\u2014but it\u2019s changing. I\u2019m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I\u2019m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I\u2019d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That\u2019s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I\u2019m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.<\/p>\n
I think I know what\u2019s going on. For more than a decade now, I\u2019ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. …<\/p>\n
…media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski….<\/p>\n
…\u201cI was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhat happened?\u201d He speculates on the answer: \u201cWhat if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I\u2019m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?\u201d…<\/p>\n
…the Internet has altered his mental habits. \u201cI now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,\u201d…<\/p>\n
…thinking, he said, has taken on a \u201cstaccato\u201d quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. \u201cI can\u2019t read War and Peace anymore,\u201d he admitted. \u201cI\u2019ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.\u201d…<\/p>\n
…The authors of the study report:<\/p>\n
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of \u201creading\u201d are emerging as users \u201cpower browse\u201d horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. …<\/p>\n
…Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts \u201cefficiency\u201d and \u201cimmediacy\u201d 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 \u201cmere decoders of information.\u201d Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. …<\/p>\n
…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. …We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. …<\/p>\n
…\u201c\u2018thoughts\u2019 in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.\u201d… [interesting thought – just pasted to think upon \ud83d\ude42 Could it possibly have some validity? Don’t know.]<\/span><\/p>\n
…The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It\u2019s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.<\/p>\n
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net\u2019s image. It injects the medium\u2019s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we\u2019re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper\u2019s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.<\/p>\n
The Net\u2019s influence doesn\u2019t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people\u2019s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience\u2019s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. … the \u201cshortcuts\u201d would give harried readers a quick \u201ctaste\u201d of the day\u2019s news, sparing them the \u201cless efficient\u201d method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. …<\/p>\n
…Taylor\u2019s ethic [of industrial manufacturing] is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the \u201cone best method\u201d\u2014the perfect algorithm\u2014to carry out every mental movement of what we\u2019ve come to describe as \u201cknowledge work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Google\u2019s headquarters, in Mountain View, California\u2014the Googleplex\u2014is the Internet\u2019s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is \u201ca company that\u2019s founded around the science of measurement,\u201d and it is striving to \u201csystematize everything\u201d it does. … What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. …<\/p>\n
…In Google\u2019s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. …<\/p>\n
… [Google’s founders] speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. \u201cThe ultimate search engine is something as smart as people\u2014or smarter,\u201d Page said in a speech a few years back. \u201cFor us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.\u201d In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, \u201cCertainly if you had all the world\u2019s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you\u2019d be better off.\u201d …<\/p>\n
…their easy assumption that we\u2019d all \u201cbe better off\u201d if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google\u2019s world, the world we enter when we go online, there\u2019s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.<\/p>\n
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network\u2019s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web\u2014the more links we click and pages we view\u2014the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. … The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It\u2019s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction. …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
After relating the mixed blessing and curse of the Internet, Carr concludes:<\/p>\n
Then again, the Net isn\u2019t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author\u2019s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.<\/p>\n
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with \u201ccontent,\u201d we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. …<\/p>\n
…we risk turning into \u201c\u2018pancake people\u2019\u2014spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.\u201d…<\/p>\n
Read the whole article to
\nput all these quotes in context.<\/p>\nIs Google Making Us Stupid?<\/a>
\nby Nicholas Carr<\/p>\n(I don’t know anything else about this author – but this article rings true with me. Even though the Atlantic Monthly, where it is posted, is loaded with Obama for Pres banners. – God help us.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Perhaps this is why we at Me and My House<\/a><\/strong><\/em> promote learning based on “old paths” – those time proven methods of seeking wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, which God declares bring success.<\/p>\n
The Internet can be a help as we teach and learn. If you choose to use it, since you have – noted by the fact that you are reading this \ud83d\ude42 – supplement with the Internet judiciously. Use it sparingly. Use it cautiously. Never forget it is reflective learning that leads to wisdom.<\/p>\n
Pray for the completion of R Road to Biblical Wisdom<\/em><\/strong><\/a> – hopefully to be published this month.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Internet can be a tremendous blessing. It allows us to reach more people than we can face to face, with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings of His Word. It can present useful ideas for us to think about, that we may not come in contact with \u2026 Continue reading