Focus and Deep Reading in the Age of the Internet
In his 2008 article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr laments the potential loss of our collective ability to “read deeply” as a consequence of the internet’s effect on our minds. I’m sure many of us can empathize with his feeling that it is more difficult to focus than it used to be, pre-internet: “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...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 have to admit, I know this feeling well myself. Carr follows this up with some anecdotal evidence - people he knows are having the same difficulty, and one man states in a phone interview with Carr that “Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it”. Carr acknowledges that “anecdotes alone don’t prove much”, but the fact that The New York Times now includes abstracts of its articles does indicate that something is changing on a larger scale.
I find myself resisting his skepticism, though. There are still hundreds of thousands of books published every year, and a great deal of long articles as well. We are still reading long pieces of writing. Perhaps one explanation for the abstracts added to The New York Times is that since the internet has provided us with access to (and awareness of) such a huge amount of information, we need better ways to identify which things are worth our full attention and time. Before the internet, a reader of TNYT may have received all of his day’s written news from the single newspaper. If he habitually bought the paper or had it delivered to his house, he had already decided on this news source. There may have been an evening edition, but there weren’t constant updates that could be read throughout the day. The reader had much less reason to be selective about which news articles to read.
Carr’s discussion of a study by the University College London about online research habits struck me for the same reason. The study found that “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” I am old enough to have done some research the old-fashioned way, in the library stacks. I still do this kind of research sometimes. This study seems to be focused on scholarly research, and I wonder why it is any surprise that most readers did this “power browsing” activity. Any time I have done research with real life journals, I have most certainly skimmed the titles, abstracts, first pages and bibliographies. I would argue that a great deal of “doing research” is this kind of activity. What is “reading in the traditional sense” when it comes to research? Reading every word of every single article that one encounters?
I don’t mean to be entirely dismissive of Carr’s points; I just tend to agree with Jamais Cascio, who suggests in "Get Smarter", his 2009 answer to Carr, that humans will evolve and adjust to this new technology and abundance of information, the same way we’ve adjusted to changes for millions of years - “by getting smarter”. His argument that we are still getting used to this “knowledge-at-a-touch”, that our attention issues may be “a short term problem” and that “our tools for managing it are still in their infancy” are sound. In fact, since these articles were published 10 years ago, I would argue that we have begun creating better tools for managing the internet and its effect on the ways we read.
An example is an app that I use very often when I need to focus on reading or any kind of work. It’s called Forest. Here is an infographic about it (I swear I'm not being paid to advertise it!):
Retraining ourselves to focus on longer pieces of writing may take some conscious effort and work. Tools like Forest may be useful for that kind of practice. There are so many available apps that could similarly help us to refocus and to rethink the ways we read and organize this endless information. There are screen time limiting programs and apps that teach meditation exercises to improve mindfulness - something I would argue is extremely beneficial for those of us feeling overstimulated and unable to focus. Something that Carr and Cascio seem to agree on is the plasticity of the human brain. Even if many of us have had difficulty "reading deeply", it is not a permanent loss - we can learn again. And maybe technology can help us with that.
Do you think it’s reasonable suggest that we have already taken positive steps toward managing the ways our brains are affected by the internet? What do you make of Cascio's discussion of intelligence and focus-enhancing drugs?
Tricia, I loved that you focused on Carr's cynicism as a tool to make your point that change is possible when it comes to deep reading. I agree with you, and think that everyone is so quick to blame the medium rather than the user using the medium. Although information is being provided differently, it doesn't necessarily mean we have learned to process that information in a new way; rather we are utilizing former methods to understand the material through the internet. I think this is why I really enjoyed "Because Digital Writing Matters" and "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture" in that both discuss the positive aspects of using the web to read and write, especially for younger generations. It is allowing those who may never have had the opportunity to read different material or write in various ways the possibility we didn't necessarily have when we were adolescents. I can remember using Dog pile in seventh grade, and thinking how overwhelmed I was by the amount of titles that flashed up on the screen, I, like you, used to rely on actual printed text to find information. However, I have discovered that the use of technology still allows me that ability with the exception of having much more resources available at my fingertips rather than searching through stacks of books at the library.
ReplyDeleteSo, to answer your question, I do believe we have taken positive steps to access information despite the way our brains and thinking processes might be changing because of it. We learn to adapt and, as James Cascio mentioned, we've been doing it for millions of years.
Thanks so much, Tricia, for such a thoughtful response to Carr's article and for sharing your tree growth (or destruction!) app. Who wants to kill a tree? One aspect of reading that I feel gets missed in these discussions is critique. While I agree that Carr goes too far in blaming the technology, I feel that Cascio goes too far in embracing it. I'm less concerned with our capacity to develop tools for comprehension and attention than I am for our capacity to critically analyze our info glutted culture. Amanda makes a good point that we too often blame the medium, rather than the user, but what Casico proposes for the future (and what we're already seeing a decade since) is a life of cyborgs, where the tool and the user and not as distinct as they use to be. Wearable technologies, watches that track fitness data, etc. can easily become, like a drug, internalized within our bodies. This situation creates exciting possibilities, but it also leads to a culture of surveillance. I'm not exactly comfortable with that.
ReplyDeleteAlex - thanks for the response. In this post I became really focused on the fears surrounding our attention spans and reading, but I am extremely uncomfortable with the surveillance that we are already seeing on a large scale, especially since so many of these huge tech companies don't have any reason to have our best interests in mind, and have every reason ($$$) to collect as much info about us as they can without informing us. Since these digital tools are becoming more and more necessary for us to live and work, I worry about how much choice we are going to have moving forward.
DeletePatricia, I totally resonate with your question about "traditional reading." I think it's important to thoughtfully research physical texts, but when I was first taught how to actively read, my teachers never said every source would be read in full. You sample it and once you get a feel for the arguments, then you must determine it's value for your own project / essay. And now with technology, as Carr argues, our mode of research adapts and changes. We have websites to help us cite, help us organize and annotate our sources, and I think only good can come of this.
ReplyDeleteI think with more organization through the use of online resources, papers and research is easier and more efficient. That app you mentioned also factors into this because it focusses our attention while rewarding us. By gamifying our focus, we can increase productivity and have a sense of self-satisfaction and enjoyment. This, however, requires some level of self-discipline but it also is an example of Carr's idea that technologies train us as much as we influence technology.
I was thinking the same thing when I read Carr's point on research. I think most people are taught to gloss potential sources to find the material that is relevant to their research. I have had moments in which I had thought I found a particularly useful source, only to find an hour or two after reading it that it was not as helpful as I had thought. It’s a disappointing feeling. With that being said, I think you and I share the same views on Carr and Cascio. I ardently disagree with Carr’s concerns. Contrariwise, I would say that Google and the internet collectively providing us with the opportunity to become smarter. Of course, like any tool, the internet’s “only as [beneficial] as the user’s purposes or goals” (Immordino-Yang et al)* For example, a good use of the internet would be if one uses the it to learn a foreign language, whereas a bad use would be if one chooses to use it only to look up memes. It depends on the person using it.
ReplyDeleteI really like the term “intelligence augmentation” or as Caisco prefers to call it “You+”. I think Google is a form of intelligence augmentation when used for educational purposes. I use Google on my phone all the time to look-up information I’m unsure about or to check the validity of something I’ve heard. I even use Google while reading to make sure I understand an allusion or to get the definition of a vocabulary word I’m unfamiliar with. I have never had trouble focusing on something that I actually enjoyed reading. I think that the reason most people skim blogs or gloss over passages is because they are looking to quickly extract information (e.g. any type of academic research.) It’s not necessarily because they are having trouble focusing. I think that people should embrace Google as a means to augment our intelligence even if this does mean that the ways we think and learn change. Rather than fear these changes, people should give them a chance.
Hey! I really liked your post Tricia! Also, I appreciate the fact that you are skeptocal of Carr's claims about the internet and his constant critique of the lack of tradirional reading. In fact, I am etrsonally happy that the way information is spreading and being accessed is changing. I do not like the ifea of reading through pages and pages of unnecessary fluff to get to the main point of each text. Besides, even if we were to read through all of the information given to us in the traditional sense, there will be passages and minor details that will be forgotten.
ReplyDeletePersonally, both Caisco and Carr are missing the point. According to me, it is the quality of transmitted information that we should concern ourselves with. The original, actual text can be translated to fit any language, any meduim at anyone's convenience. It is only the quality that is the main point. I really like to think that bulky texts can be simplified. It really helps those who struggle with reading and it can help those with a time crunch. Personally, English is not my first language and I owe my life to resources such as sparknotes and shmoop. They have helped me to understand the main points of texts while allowing e the time to go back and delve into the language. No matter which way I red it, the quality f information has never failed me.
Your criticism of Carr's points is one that I share myself. I find it semi-unbelievable to simply cry out that now because of smart phones no one can hold their attention for an extended period of time anymore. While I am sure that may be true for him and his friends that he quotes in anecdotes, the sheer rise in book sales being reported (despite many book stores sadly closing) all over both through eBooks and sites like Amazon suggest that reading long form prose continues to live on well. That or people are buying a ridiculous amount of coffee table books that they have no intention of opening.
ReplyDeleteI also need to quote some anecdotal evidence myself since that seems to be the trend throughout Carr’s piece. All throughout my undergraduate education, my father always told me “while I’m glad you are going to school, I just don’t understand why they make you memorize everything when in the real world you can grab a book or your computer and look up what you need to know as long as you can use that stuff you looked up.” My father may not have been a big school advocate, and certainly school never worked out for him, but I always thought his point was a good one and it stuck with me. Rather than Google making us stupid, I agree with Ryan. The ability to look up information at any given moment and the skills I have gained in utilizing that information from the internet far outweighs any loss in ability to read a long dense article in one setting that I do not find engaging enough.
I think society has ultimately just moved in a direction where writers need to make sure that their work is engaging and worth a reader devoting the attention to it if they want to be read. I do not necessarily think that is a bad thing either.
Thanks for your post, Tricia. I recommend a few apps to my students that similarly look to keep someone from unproductively using their phone or laptop when they need to get work done, but I haven't seen this tree one. When I make suggestions like that, most of my students let me know in one way or another that they don't think an app that can both keep them from opening up social media and be controlled by them will stop them from doing what they want--they're still going to go on Instagram. But Forest seems to be a bit smarter in that it doesn't simply place an easily removable barrier to their access of social media, but instead acts as a subtle reminder of what they're supposed to be doing.
ReplyDeleteLike most people, I'm somewhere between Carr's pessimism and Cascio's optimism, with my leaning towards the latter. My main concern for a Google-run future is how much control it has over the information we can access. Although I don't think Google or other search platforms are purposefully manipulating information--despite recent claims to the contrary by the 17th most followed Twitter account--I can't help but see one (or two or three) company's control of the information we receive as a bit worrying. I do not share all of Carr's concerns with technology's effect on its user, and I think these technologies are benefitting us. But these benefits can lead to growing dependency on technology, and if we're all going to become part cyborgs with our phones/other digital devices, then they can easily shape how we think--or, perhaps, they can easily program us in a certain way.
Great post, Tricia! I thought your point about "power browsing" and how students do research in the book stacks was spot on. There is no doubt that someone doing research offline would be reading an abstract of a paper before taking the time to read every word of the work. If someone is researching online, I don't see a problem with "power browsing" either, considering that they are going to be exposed to so much more material and that they will ultimately need to vet their sources for a research paper when a source could be coming from anywhere.
ReplyDeleteI definitely think that we have already taken positive steps in approaching how our brains are affected by the internet. Your example of the use of mindfulness apps is an excellent example. There has been a huge surge in interest regarding mindfulness and I feel that this is a direct response to the Internet Age we live in. I know mindfulness has helped me. Being constantly available to friends and family or continuously bombarded with information really makes mindfulness a haven in which to unplug. Most mindfulness recordings or session (I'm partial to the body scan) begin with an explanation that this is a time for yourself to be with yourself, which almost translates to being alone. Rather taking time for yourself to be with yourself allows you to get away from the "noise" yet at the same time being aware of your body, breath, and mind.
Hi Tricia! When reading Carr's article, I kept on thinking about how dated it was. Yes, there are plenty of people that want the information quickly or only skim when they read (I can be guilty of it too), but you're right when you said that there has to be things in place now that can help get us "more focused." Today, I have heard from classmates and students that they are more likely to read a physical book, instead of looking at something on the screen. In my mind, that is good, because even though we have this technology, it isn't so much of a crutch anymore.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of that app, Forest! So, it tracks how much you use your phone, right? I think a lot of times people don't realize how reliant they are of their phones, and things like that app can help put it into perspective. Having things like this in place is a great way to get us more focused, because you're right, reading deeply and getting more engaged can be re-learned.
Tricia:
ReplyDeleteTo address your closing question, the short answer is, yes! I do think we are already taking steps toward managing how we are affected by and make use of the internet. I am no psychologist or neuroscience and cannot speak with any authority as to how or why our brains may be changing but in terms of observable behavior I definitely see people (myself included) taking steps toward time management and concentrated focused reading. Strategies are popping up everywhere. There are apps like Forest. There are apps that make use of the Pomodoro technique and call for a certain period of sustained reading followed by a break. There is something to be said about the increased danger of distraction in the Internet Age. I am thinking about all the times that I am reading something or working on something and I see that little flicker of movement at the top left of my screen indicating I have received a Facebook message. The temptation to check it is strong. Most of the time I do. But if I don't want to be distracted I close my other windows and open them when I take a break. As compelling as some of Carr's points are he seems to forget at times that we are still human beings no matter what technology we make use of. We have control and we will create and make use of various methods to control our level of distraction and maintain focus. As Cascio reminds us, we still have the ability to learn and adapt and that is what we will do. it is what we are already doing.
I do however have a bit of skepticism regarding Cascio's advocacy for intelligence enhancing drugs. It sounds all well and good in theory and perhaps some day it will be. But he casually mentions college students using adderall and similar drugs presumably off prescription like it's a positive thing. As far as any new pharmaceutical and technological related discovery is concerned I think it prudent to approach with caution. Just because we have the use of something does not mean we yet fully know what it is or what it ultimately means. The race "to get their first" in science is equally problematic if not more problematic than a completely Luddite attitude.
Thanks for your post, Tricia, and thanks also for your app recommendation. I am going to try it out! I think, as most of us have indicated, I'm more inclined to agree with Cascio's argument than Carr's. I wonder if this has anything to do with the duration of time that has passed since Carr's article. Although Cascio writes only a year later, we're at a point where our digital technology has developed so much since 2008 that Carr's anxieties seem almost naive retrospectively. However, it's important for us to remain suspect--so I appreciate that you mention in your post that you don't entirely dismiss Carr's argument. I think I alluded to this in my annotations on his essay, but I agree with him that these transitions--as from physical to digital text, for example--can be difficult to embrace. But, as Carr argues, we'll manage. So, in response to your question, I do think that we've taken positive steps toward alleviating the anxieties about Google's influence on our intelligence levels and attention spans. Many seem to embrace the kinds of affordances offered by Google in an academic setting. I also think, though, that our anxieties about digital technologies evolve as the technologies do--so while we may have resolved this specific apprehension, we've moved onto others, such as the actual merging of humans and technology (granted, this has been a fear for a while now).
ReplyDeleteI'm echoing everyone else's sentiments, but I'll say it anyway, I don't think anyone who has ever conducted research has fully read every article they've come across. Not every document is going to be of use, so why waste your time readings upwards of hundreds of pages if you know you're not going to use it? That's just poor time management. I think the difference in our time is that with technology, our searches clicks can be tracked for a study such as the one Carr mentioned, so it looks as if our focus is strained, when really we are performing the same level of discernment, but with far more resources at our fingertips. If I find a source that focuses on the topic(s) I'm interested in researching, or perhaps makes an intriguing counterpoint to my research, then I will save the document and read it "deeply." Honestly, I think online research databases are extremely helpful. Gone are the days of limiting library collections, and pouring over material that may be outdated by the time we gain access to it. Now we are able to pool hundreds of thousands of sources (maybe millions, I've not looked it up), filter by dates, mediums, subjects, etc. to taylor more accurate data/knowledge collection. I don't really see a reason to romanticize the old way. For instance, it would be impossible to perform my fact-checking internship if I had to physically find each source used in a given 30+ page article. It would take me months to complete one assignment, which is prohibitively time consuming. It's physical labor that we no longer (necessarily) have to focus on, and instead we can put more of our efforts into selecting and engaging with the material.
ReplyDeleteBut of course this level of media discernment needs to be taught, which is where we come in, because it's really easy to fall into a black hole of untrustworthy or harmful sources.
DeleteI do think it's reasonable! I love the Forest app, and I totally used it to read Digital Writing Matters this week xD. When I read Carr's paranoia, a few things bubble to the surface for me: 1. It just seems to me that we have more OPTIONS for reading now than we did before. As we move towards teaching students to write in different modes, can we not do the same thing with reading? To send a tweet is different than to write a paper -- so reading a tweet is different than reading an essay or a book. I think DeVoss, Edieman-Aadahl, and Hicks are correct in their call to English teachers to learn more so they can guide students in our new world with more tech. 2. On a more petty, personal note, I don't really understand why Carr himself feels so out of control about his own reading habits changing. It feels like Carr secretly likes digital culture, but is scared of his own impulsivity. Is this fear part of what sticks us in place, that apps like Forest can help with?
ReplyDeleteAs for intelligence-performance enhancing drugs, I'm a little ambivalent/not super worried about that. I will say that Cascio observes, “As the science improves, we could see other kinds of cognitive-modification drugs that boost recall, brain plasticity, even empathy and emotional intelligence." This entire discussion of performance enhancing drugs immediately made me think of antidepressants and other drugs used to help with mental health, which already DO help modifying human brain activity.
Lastly, Carr, I think you need to see this if you think Google is making us stupid, from the tumblr account of Drunken Shakespeare:
http://drunken-shakespeare.tumblr.com/post/115966749724/twelfth-night-google-searches