January 14th, 2009
by treatmentspecialist
It’s no surprise that web searching, internet surfing and even text messaging has changed the way we read and receive information.
In an Atlantic Monthly article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr talks about what the internet has done to his brain. He describes a new found inability to immerse himself in a book or lengthy article:
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’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
He goes on to talk about how the internet has far-reaching and powerful affect on our cognition and goes as far as to say it is reprogramming our brains on a biological level.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s 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’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
Which is why Power Browsers have emerged.
Are you a Power Browser?
Do you bounce from site to site? Have you lost the ability to absorb long articles or even read through a blog post that’s longer than three paragraphs? Do you scan for headlines and abstracts? If you’ve answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, you are not alone.
Finally there’s help for Power Browsers!
Check out the Medieval Help Desk and get all the technical support you need to feel comfortable picking up a book again. (There’s a version of this video in English for those of you who can’t endure subtitles – but for some reason, it’s not as funny.)
Web Marketing Therapy Related Links:
Pamela Sherman
(January 15th, 2009 at 1:15 pm)
Great Share Emilia!
Very clever and funny of my Swedish “comm-rads”… They did a fine job in depicting what can happen to our minds when we have so much available at the tips of our computer-typing fingers! It’s tricky… when the world of information is like a GIANT WORLD-WIDE BUFFET of food, it’s really hard to stick with one plate to eat at a time. We all have to develop a new discipline of sorts in this new age we’re living in to delve deeper and control our snacking-appetites.
Sue
(February 8th, 2009 at 11:17 am)
For a librarian, that segment was hard to watch! After all, if things go the way they have been going, I won’t be needed to reshelve or check out books!
Emilia Doerr
(February 9th, 2009 at 12:56 pm)
Hi Sue! I don’t know about not needing librarians anymore – but I know there’s a new need for more great online info tamers like you!