Page 10
“The Internet may have made me a less patient reader, but I think that in many ways it has made me smarter… All three know they’ve sacrificed something important, but they wouldn’t go back to the way thinks used to be.”
I think we’re all inclined to want to believe this statement. That there are already so many people out there with so many negative things to say about the Internet that we just want to say something nice about it already. I must say I completely disagree with this quote. I don’t think the Internet is making us any smarter. Not only is it causing us to be less focused but it is also in turn hindering our ability to make connections to other resources. When we are online we are overwhelmed with hundreds of different little bits of information. In those brief moments that we are concentrated on one task, we might be able to make all those connections but what happens when we shift our attention elsewhere? Would we still be able to make those connections half an hour later? A week later? Years later? How focused were we to begin with? Does any ‘deep reading’ take place when we’re surfing the web? Muses Davis makes an optimistic statement. A bold one too. But I think the reality is a little different.
Page 65
“Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind.”
This is such an interesting way to think of reading. A lot of us can agree that meditation is some sort of relaxing experience, one in which we let go of our worries. For some of us, reading serves as a meditative medium. In the process however, we’re learning and absorbing new information. It’s almost as if work is relaxing (?). Reading and concentration requires some degree of work, in some cases more than others but regardless of the degree of work we’re doing something, right? It makes me think of reading books that I love. Those moments in which I’m completely enveloped in the story and the characters are all real to me. Not only am I both enjoying the act of reading and paying close attention but I am also learning and making connections to the real world. Sometimes this happens when I’m studying too. Those moments when I’m so concentrated on the subject at hand that I feel myself absorbing every little bit of information I’m reading and oddly enough, there’s something relaxing about it. It’s one of those things what we know but never actually verbalize and that’s why this sentence made me think a little longer than the others did.
