| So, a good friend of mine recently wrote a blog post. It can be found here. It referred to another article, which can be found here. These articles ask an interesting question: is the Internet making us stupid? (Specifically relating to reading, in the primary analysis, but a good general question.) This question inspired some thoughts. I couldn't resist the delicious irony of posting them here.  My answer to the question: yes. My solution? SUCK IT UP AND READ! Or do whatever it is that you feel like the Internet is depriving you of your capability to do. A bit overstated, but my answer. I just went through Chretien de Troyes' Romances and Dostoevksy's Demons in a couple of weeks, and it was surprisingly difficult... possibly because I've also been reading webcomics, which, if the article is correct, are as bad as it can possibly get. But I did read those books successfully, enjoyed them tremendously, and will probably re-read them sometime in the next five years... not necessarily because I really really want to do so, but because I've recognized since I left PHC the importance of continuing to read extensively. Therefore, I deliberately choose to read things that I know will challenge me. But it is worth noting that the more online work/research/reading I do, the more difficult it is for me to garner interest in long magazine articles or extensive books. I wonder if there's any connection between this phenomenon and today's tendency to publish books in series and sequels and prequels even though there's no particularly unique story being told in each volume? I'm in the middle of my fourth series in the past two years that gets really annoying because there's a ton of smaller volumes, all of which are really telling only one story. Argh. (Someone got smart and packaged one trilogy as a single volume... that was nice. Still obnoxious because the author had written the same story for three books, with resulting confusion, but...) There may also be some connection to the increasing success of television shows that set up a static platform and tell a single story per episode within that platform... CSI, for instance, or Eureka. This happens while shows based on long, drawn out plot arcs... of which type Babylon 5 is probably the most extreme example, but others come to mind... like Firefly... struggle more and more to survive long enough to catch people's interest... Come to think of it... The most recent crops of successful computer/platform video games have been focused on re-playability and variety/uniqueness in gameplay to produce a popular game, with emphasis on open worlds that can be played for a lot of hours, rather than a really extensive story arc... See the success of Guitar Hero or Grand Theft Auto (whatever number it's at now). Even Oblivion, which one might expect to be a massive RPG, has a simple storyline... it just takes a long time to do it all. Although, to be fair, I don't go in for the long story arcs in a computer game myself... I like RTS... so I might just not be "in the know." (Argh... now that I mentioned RTS, pardon me while I go drool over Starcraft II for a minute.) Anyway, all that to say... yes, the Internet is making us stupid. Mostly by providing ever newer and more innovative ways for us to be mentally lazy, if we so choose. So, just like I need to SUCK IT UP AND EXERCISE, all of the people complaining about how the Internet or video games or whatever are making us dumb (by which they mean incapable of reading, writing, doing advanced math or scientific research, etc.) should SUCK IT UP AND ______________________. P.S.: As per usual, this rambling is poorly organized and not very clear, so I'll make an effort to actually check this thing in case people want to ask questions. |
