I distinctly remember the process of researching flamingos for a project in grade four (it was ground-breaking stuff, believe me). I had to walk to the library, open up a card catalogue, look up a book on birds, find that book in the stacks, check the index for flamingos, read it to verify the information I needed was in fact there, and finally, read a page, close the book and write down only what I could remember, as per the teacher’s instructions.
Today, I could type the word “flamingo” into Google and come across a plethora of information. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t even be surprised if a flamingo flew out of my computer and landed in my room. Is it true? Has the internet made me lazier than my grade four self?
It’s doubtful that anyone of our digital generation would argue against the convenience of the Internet. The answer to any question is quite literally at your fingertips. It often amazes me to think that someone out there has answered the obscure questions I’ve Googled in the past. Which brings me to another scary thought: is my creativity waning because of the Internet, or were my thoughts just more original before I knew everyone else had them? But I digress.
Like most other people, I use the Internet on a daily basis. I email, Facebook, research, shop, bank, and plan my weekends online. However, as I accomplish these tasks, I find myself constantly distracted by ads, messages, and links. It seems I’m living a life full of tangents and random facts. I ask my friends and they say the same things: they’re constantly distracted; it’s much harder to stay on task than it used to be; and focusing on one thing at a time seems tedious in the age of multi-tasking. Is it possible that we’re all suffering from the same malady? Has the internet affected the way we think?
A 2009 study in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry found that being online stimulates the visual regions of the brain more than reading material in print, which may be a result of the colours and pop-ups that are thankfully absent from a good old-fashioned paperback. Another contentious article (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”) written in 2008 by Nicholas Carr discussed similar issues.
Perplexed by the same questions that I have, in his article, Carr attempted to shed light on the effects of the Internet on human thought. Carr agreed that we process information from the Internet by scanning text and jumping from topic to topic, a sort of mental leapfrog that ultimately turns us into disjointed thinkers who are unable to concentrate for more than a few seconds on the task at hand. While this technique might be useful online, Carr interviewed people who confessed that they were often distracted on a day-to-day basis. Reading a chapter in a book often took intense amounts of concentration, and traditional tasks seemed somewhat slow.
“Internet thinking” encourages us to gather information, but not actually make connections as we constantly search for the next source of stimulus. He mentions a study that tracked visits to two popular research websites. The visitors exhibited a pattern of jumping from article to article, allowing enough time to skim abstracts and often never return to the original source. So maybe we’re not lazy, but rather, impatient.
It’s rare nowadays to write a paper and browse through the periodicals on an actual bookshelf in the library. But it’s been done. Along with walking uphill both ways in the snow, our parents (and their parents) had to write all their research papers without the Internet. I can’t argue that we have it much easier than they did, and an online library is A-okay by me. I just don’t think we should take it for granted.
My weak attempts to thwart the Internet (I don’t use a smartphone and… well actually, that’s it) haven’t been all that successful. But I do see an emerging pattern that I’m eager to break. After all, there’s nothing more rewarding than knowing a handful of things really well, versus random facts that you can hardly recall anyway. Playing hopscotch on the Internet doesn’t need to be translated to daily life.
