Nicholas Carr is upfront in the opening chapter of The Shallows by remarking on how he can feel his brain changing. He says, “Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” (p. 5). I instantly connected with Carr’s confession. I’ve (somewhat unknowingly) had the same feeling for the past few years, but by reading that introduction, I finally confronted it.
Without trying to sound ostentatious, I was a very good high school student. I kept a 4.0 GPA, and my standardized test scores were high. Plus, I played two sports and worked on the weekends, so it wasn’t as if I didn’t have distractions at the time. I got an iPhone in the spring of my senior year. By the end of my sophomore year at Mizzou, I started to notice a difference in my cognition, presumably as a result of spending so much time attending to my iPhone.
My attention span had become fleeting. I would contemplate thoughts as if I were going to tweet about it, reducing and summarizing concepts down into 140 characters or less. I couldn’t read for more than 45 minutes at a time without falling asleep or getting distracted- as a kid, I would power through hundreds of pages of a book in a day just for fun; I would become too engaged to put the book down. I related strongly to Carr’s metaphor that “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski” (p. 7).
I noticed I wasn’t able to study for tests until one, maybe two nights before, and it has reflected in my grades. If I tried studying earlier than that, I would become distracted so easily that I would end up brushing it off. I needed to wait until the stress of a looming exam would prevent me from being distracted by television, movies, social media, texts, phone calls, or mindless internet surfing. In class, we’ve discussed how our generation is the most stressed in history, and I think that’s why. It’s an extreme thought, but there are so many distractions that dictate our lives and pull us in a myriad of directions, that the only way we can effectively focus on a task is by channeling stress into productivity.
I wasn’t able to fully understand the attachment to my iPhone until I studied abroad in Auckland, New Zealand last semester. I bought a cheap prepaid phone that only supported texting and calls while I was down there. It became so liberating to not feel “tied down” by the internet in my pocket. I (ironically) became more social, and truly enjoyed the sights and experiences of my time abroad without feeling obligated to tweet, SnapChat, Instagram, or otherwise capture everything I did through my smartphone. Not sure if it was merely coincidental, but by the end of my semester abroad, I was reading novels again in my free time. Since coming back to the United States, and my iPhone, I’ve begun to feel ensnared by the Net again, and that sense of stress dictating my mind, to the point that it “wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better” (p. 10). When that infinite amount of information and connection to the rest of the world is available in in your pocket and at your fingertips, it’s difficult to resist getting caught up in it. And once you start using it, it gets more and more difficult to get away.
The World Wide Web, indeed.
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