flappy

Two examples:
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “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 three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m 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’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. 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. 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.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

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Grieves

results may very...


maybe we don't need to waste so much time filling up paper so we have learned to streamline and get to the point easier/faster...just consider the internet as an assembly line for your mind...

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flappy

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

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The Rev

The more measurement we use in our thinking, the more abstract reality becomes. As for War and Peace, I still love reading a good book. In fact, I have downloaded many of them from the Internet.

My concern is more with what TELEVISION is doing to our brains. With the modern explosion in the cases of ADD and other learning disabilities, along with the same increase in affective disorders (depression, OCD, anxiety), I wonder if the exponential increase in input our brains gained with TV isn't to blame for these problems. This, of course, is totally seperate from the issue of how the tube conditions us to think, creates social examples, stimulates our basic needs and insecurities, etc.



The Rev

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Bearsy

Isn't the ability to take in and comprehend information quicker and more efficiently a good thing?

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BibleGuy

On one hand I think so, but I also think the Rev has a good point related to depression, OCD, anxiety - not just from TV, but all the media. We exist in an age of information overload where people are actually encouraged to and rewarded for maximizing the ability to mimick a pinball. The corporate world calls is "multitasking", which is handling/processing overload. Expert multitaskers often have no idea how to be still and many survive on Paxil, Xanax and Ambien, etc.

I think the world is winding the clock way too tight.

The Rev

I like that.



The Rev

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Ego Tripping

By just skimming through this thread, I can tell it's useless.

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Dozer McDozer

lol i read the silmarillion i think i'm ok

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Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance. - Albert Einstein

Properly trained, man can be a dog's best friend - i'll get his name once i get book back

Mafoo

i definitely feel like tv has done much more to limit my attention span. on the internet i can choose the amount of info i want to dive into. from brief abstracts to entire essays and novels. i can get the info i need right away and then choose if i want some more. thats a good thing IMO

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PLUR
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return

flappy

This is way over vErGO's head.

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Bearsy

Just like his joke is way over yours.

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Anonymous4674

I consider the internet a good thing. Of course, the parts I am referring to are: porn, access to information, porn, and more access to information and porn.

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Ordained by the church of the Latter Day Dude.


"I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant..." (Alan Greenspan)

Bearsy

Yeah I'm reading War and Peace as well as The Brothers Karamazov and I'm having no problem with either one.
In fact I "blame" the internet for giving me the capability to read and comprehend both of these rather daunting books at the same time.

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flappy

What do you like about War and Peace ?

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flappy

Another thing, no one believes you are reading War&Peace and the Bros.Karamasov at the same time. (You forgot The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire).

Seems like this phoney liked to brag about the books he read,too.
http://www.funny-games.biz/images/pi...annot-read.jpg

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Ego Tripping

Exactly. The irony tastes quite iron-y.

I nominate Flappy as the new GHM.

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Ego Tripping

You old fart...people would believe Bearsy if he said he was the President of the United States of America and came from an ancient race that lived under the sea before they would believe a single thread you've posted during your entire tenure on the board.

If the net is fucking with your brain so much, you can help improve it by not using it anymore.

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flappy

Is this Ego or Verk talking...anybody's guess. One turns into another, depending on how much weed is smoked.

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flappy

Back to thinking men's topics. Seems like Ego and friends like to drag things into the gutter, especially things they don't understand.

What the internet is doing to our brains.
Two examples:
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “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 three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m 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’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. 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. 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.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

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