The past five years I’ve had portable audio players with me much of the time. Filled with audiobooks, podcasts and lectures there is hardly a minute where I can’t be found with earplugs. I’ve grown so accustomed to having them in that I sometimes wear them without anything playing. It’s not as if I experience phantom pains if I don’t wear them, but I hardly register their presence anymore, and the second I’m not reading I’ll start listening to Science in the city or Arts and Ideas or any of the other 40 odd podcasts I’m subscribing to.
A couple of years ago I killed my mp3 player with excessive volts. Later the same day I walked to the store and heard birds for the first time in a good while. Their chirping reminded me of the time I was wasting. Every minute I walked without headphones on was a minute I wasn’t learning stuff. I remember walking faster only to get back to some sort of content. Too broke to pay I bought an iPod on credit from the store I was working at the next day.
Of course this has nothing to do with actual learning. It’s not even a pursuit of trivia or satiation of a particular interest. It’s the idea that time ought not to be wasted and by learning stuff you become better – whatever “better” means – and becoming better is better than not becoming better.
In the end I find that much of what I listen to doesn’t stick; I’ve become a good reference for references, but don’t retain much information, nor any big picture stuff aquired through osmosis. The articles below deal with this and they are worthy of your attention if you can manage reading for longer than three minutes.
He sees our distraction as a full-blown epidemic—a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought. He compares it, in fact, to smoking. “People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes,” he says, “in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.”
→ New York, Sam Anderson: In defense of distraction
His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
→ The Atlantic Online, Nicholas Carr: Is Google making us stupid?
The Internet, paradoxically, empowers both the individual and the state. On the one hand, it allows people who had no way to express themselves before, whether for political or economic reasons, an outlet to do so. The Net also makes it much easier to find out what people in other countries are thinking. On the other hand, it gives governments a better view into their citizens’ activities. There’s a danger that some people might mistake the apparent anonymity of the Net for true anonymity.
→ The Sun, Arnie Cooper: Computing the cost; Nicholas Carr on how the Internet is rewiring our brains
