Many may believe that smart searchesand smart phones are making us stupid or lazy. Nicholas Carr, who made theargument that Google is making us stupid, would agree with them; However, theauthor of the opposing argument, “ Think Digital Distractions Have Killed ourAttention Spans? Think Again”, Stuart Jefferies, disagrees and do I. Books arenow available online so we have all the information we need at our fingertips-without wasting paper. Our phones may be distracting us, but those distractionscan also be expanding our minds with all the knowledge we obtain from ourphones’ wealth of information. Many people do not read booksanymore in the first place.
But for those who do, they often consist of audiobooks and eBooks. Continuing to print paper books is bad for the environmentand sometimes the small print can be bad for our eyes. An eBook will eliminateboth of those issues by replacing paper with a screen and having the ability toenlarge the text. Plus, a lot of books are just too long. “ Why didn’t she read Tartt as an ebook? Why did she choose thisinefficient delivery system that proves what Philip Larkin wrote at the endof A Study ofReading Habits, namely that “ books are a load of crap”?.
” In Carr’s argument, he talks about a manloosing his sight and that he feared he would have to give up reading alltogether. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to beprecise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page hadbecome exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He hadbeen forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have togive it up. This is no longer an issue withbooks, for they can be read to you as an audio book.
Typing is also easierbecause you can speak directly into your smart device and it will type for you. As an added bonus, it usually spells the words correctly. Carr states that “ Research thatonce required days in the stacks or periodical rooms oflibraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clickson hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.
” Whatonce took a very long time to research or learn about now takes a few hours. Thiseither gives us more time to learn about that subject or more time to learnabout another matter. I believe the internet is also making us smarter becausewe can now receive an education online, like I’m doing right now. We haveunlimited amounts of texts and books to read on the internet. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etchedinto our genes the way speech is.
We have to teach our minds how to translatethe symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. Having the use of the internet at our palms may bedistracting, but it is also making us smarter by giving us a ton of knowledgeinstantly. “ Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging inthe Web’s info-thickets, reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines andblog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping fromlink to link to link.” Even streaming sources that allow us to watch movies, television shows, and documentaries are expanding our knowledge.
“ Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapersshorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages witheasy-to-browse info-snippets.” The access of theinternet may be making us lazier, but it is not making us stupid. We may be toolazy to get up and get a book, but we can read all of them from our devices. The need to look something up no longer requires a ginormous thesaurus but onlythe typing of a few words into a search engine and a vast amount of informationis there for you. Digital distractions are taking a little time from what weresupposed to be doing; however, our brains are expanding with all of theinformation we gather, all the articles we read, and with all the videos wewatch.