Bloggiesta Progress

So, it turns out my 1 a.m. Friday night goals are lot more ambitious than my Saturday-morning-and-it’s-sunny ability to finish them. Continue reading »

Is Reading Online is Making Us Stupid?

There is an interesting article in The Atlantic about reading and our changing reading habits, thanks to the Internet.

I think the author has some great points: internet has changed the way I read, and that’s why I’m feeling a need to really read deeply right now.

In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive. …

In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

What do you think? Is reading on the Internet making you less able to read?