The way the Internet is altering our habits

Blame it all on Google!

Have you ever noticed it's getting more difficult for you to focus on reading lengthy texts? Can you concentrate hard on the text you read online or is your attention constantly diverted by interesting links? Do you stop reading to reply to a new e-mail message, which keeps blinking at the bottom of your screen? Just remember how many articles or e-mails you found intriguing and saved, saying to yourself you will read them later. Now think about how many of them you actually read? If the answer is few, this article is aimed at you


By ADRIJANA MILOSAVLJEVIĆ
from Belgrade, SERBIA


One of the most popular topics among bloggers lately is "The effect of the Internet on our reading habits and habits in general". The countless blog posts on this subject were provoked by Nicholas Carr's cover story of the July issue of Atlantic Monthly: "Is Google Making Us Stupid: What The Internet is doing to Our Brains". In it, he claims there are some sweeping changes in reading habits in people who spend hours surfing the Net.

"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. That's 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. 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", notices Carr.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, sees eye to eye with Mr Carr. "I can't read War and Peace anymore," he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than four paragraphs is too much to absorb. "

A recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea 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'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

The new style of reading promoted by the Net puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else. Is it weakening our capacity for deep reading? The modern man is used to multitasking, i.e. doing many things at the same time and doing them NOW. The main characteristic of a Net surfer is impatience.

Opinions are mixed. Some bloggers agree the way we think is obviously changing, but that we can only blame ourselves, not the Net. (A bad workman always blames his tools.) Others wonder if the outcome of having machines that think is having a man that does not. Another group calls Google their best friend who gives them a plentitude of interesting ideas and choices.

As for the Google, the company has declared that its mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. " They add that they seek to develop "the perfect search engine," the one which "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want."

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" 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. Will the generations to come study from print books or e-books (as it is already the case at some colleges)? Maryanne Wolf, a psychologist says: "We are not only what we read. We are how we read."


(Published: 10.08.2008.)