Tech Tips for Catholic Teens

This past weekend, a friend and I went to Borders bookstore to browse around. As I skimmed the magazine isles, a cover of a particular magazine jumped out at me. I had never heard of Atlantic magazine, but Nicholas Carr wrote an interesting article where he asks the question “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Not just Google, but the internet in general. Are our minds being reprogrammed, so to speak?

“My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. 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. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. 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 feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle…And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski…” - (Nicholas Carr, the author of the article).

As he explores the facts and philosophies behind this question, Nicholas brings up some pretty interesting things. I would encourage you to print out this article and really read it (not just skim a couple of paragraphs like your newly reprogrammed mind will want to do ; )

In my own life, I too have seen how my mind is being effected by the new technologies of today. For instance, when I am reading a book, I keep forgetting that I don’t have the Ctrl+F feature built into my brain. Then I get sidetracked for minutes, thinking about how cool it would be to have this power to search the text in a book by just thinking of a key word or phrase. By the time I realize that I have drifted off, I have forgotten where I left off. So I can totally realate to this article, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”.

How is the internet effecting your mind, habits, or lifestyle? Post a comment.