The Future of Reading. Endangered!

[ChrisC]

I have for myself, turning the computer off for a few days helps me to breeze through books. However, when it's on, hardly a chapter or two ever get read.

This article is interesting as I have felt the same. I need to turn the computer off if I want to do some serious reading.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

How has the internet effected your reading time/habits?

[temp]

hmmm, I like scientific evidence...this article tends to be light on the science and instead is looking for a scapegoat to blame for attention problems. Things like TV, movies, computer games, etc and now the internet seem to be popular things to point the finger at, but is there any hard evidence to support the theory? I'm not saying it's not possible...I just want the hard facts.

I would argue the opposite...the internet is making us smarter. It has opened up a much more accessible archive of "stuff" (some of it informational..but I guess you have to weed through all the crap!).

Here's an "aside" thought because I am feeling particularly thoughtful this morning and don't feel like workin...does having knowledge stored in your brain make you "smart"? If person A knows 5 things, and person B knows 10 things...does it follow that person B is smarter than person A?

Here's a crazy theory that I just made up...let's say you have enough space in your brain to remember 10 things. But, you only use up 5 of those spaces, and use the other 5 for other thought processes, and if you need to know another thing you can just call up the internet to temporarily get the fact you need and don't have to waste your time storing that info. In this way you are smarter than the guy that has already used up his 10 spaces because you have those extra 5 for other thought processes...
hehe, I think I'm making it obvious that I'm a computer guy and know nothing about physcology/congnition

[admin]

I can offer some anecdotal evidence from the prob and stat class I taught yesterday. One of my students was in danger of flunking the course. I studied his papers, and discovered he didn't have the concept of the "number line". He was a non-traditional student, an ex-marine in his fifties, and evidently they didn't teach the number line when he was in school, or maybe he just didn't remember it from so long ago. He had taken the course before, and failed it, and at that time his teacher told him, "This is stuff you should have learned in high school." But that's no help.

I took fifteen minutes during my office hours to teach him the number line, and in no time at all he was putting numbers, both positive and negative decimals, in the correct place on the number line.

Now, in my opinion, that's what smart is. Smart isn't how much you know, it's how quick you learn.