5.4

The excerpt from The Shallows was poignant and interesting.  I did not have to read far before I started to relate.  I was especially struck by his points about not have patience to delve into long pieces of writing.  I, too, used to be a ravenous reader.  I have been blaming graduate school for my lack of motivation to read.  I assumed that having so much assigned reading and taken the joy out of reading for pleasure.  However, after reading Carr, I am beginning to wonder if technology has stolen my joy for reading.  Maybe I have fallen into the same trap that Carr described when he said, "And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation.  Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swift moving stream of particles" (p. 6-7).  I felt it even reading this text.  As I read on and on, I was interested but felt the ever growing strain of maintaining focus.  I tried really hard to read books for fun over the summer since I did not have any classes for the first time since beginning graduate school.  I picked up five or six different books that I had been wanting to read, but barely made it a few chapters before I lost interest.  However, I could watch hours of documentaries on Netflix or sift through hundreds of blogs about random things on my iPad.  My attention was better held by digital media and I do not know when that shift happened.  We see this phenomenon a lot with children with ADHD.  Parents will say, "He can play a video game or watch a cartoon for hours.  Why can he not sit still and pay attention in school."  The answer is simple according to Carr and the other authors he references.  Digital media changes so frequently that we are not required to engage in deep thought or concentration. 

I was also struck by Carr's discussion of the human brain and computers.  I feel that a lot of the information processing literature compares the human mind to a computer.  Even our PowerPoints would compare different pieces of memory to computer parts like hard drives.  Carr says, "[People assume] that the brain operates according to the same formal mathematical rules as a computer does - that in other words, the brain and the computer speak the same language.  But that is a fallacy born of our desire to explain phenomena that we don't understand in terms we do understand" (p. 176).  According to Carr, long term memory is much more complex than a hard drive, but a hard drive is something we as humans can wrap our heads around.  What did we compare long term memory to before computers?  Pulling material from long term memory is much more complex than pulling it from a hard drive.  Retrieval requires effort and connections and activation.  Pulling information from a hard drive only involves locating and selecting.  While I computer is a great analogy for information processing, it does a disservice to the awe inspiring magnitude of the human brain.  The human brain is capable of so much more than a computer.  My computer does not inherently know that certain files should be grouped together in one folder because they are all for the same class.  I  have to tell it that.  Our brain does know how to organize material into groups and make associations to help us find that information later.  Our brain's ability to organized has influenced computer organizational structures, but it still takes the human to keep the computer organized.

I feel like I could go on and on, so I will only discuss one more point.  When Carr was discussing memory and the purpose of memorizing material he wrote in reference to someone else's thoughts, "[They] were not recommending memorization for memorization's sake or as a rote exercise for retaining facts.  To him, memorizing was far more than a means of storage.  It was the first step in a process of synthesis, a process that led to a deeper and more personal understanding of one's reading" (p. 178-179).  I believe that James would have supported this notion.  Memorizing is helpful because to memorize you have to connect.  And when you connect you learn.  Memory can be a powerful too for learning if it is fully taken advantage of and if adequate connections are made.  James would argue that children cannot learn by rote memory without connections and associations.  Carr would agree, as I would I.  Learning must be meaningful and interesting (another James point).  If students can connect what they are learning to something interesting, they will learn it all the better.