EMAC 2321 Assignment…
Today my world stood still, and I made it happen. Something I could not do yesterday. What an odd and uncomfortable experience, I must admit. They say the Earth rotates at 1000 miles per hour, it’s my firm belief that in today’s day and age we, as students plugged into the grid, should be going just as fast if not faster. For our EMAC 2321 Assignment due today, I am a great procrastinator by the way (no doubt a skill fine tuned by the likes of social networking), we are to write a blog chronicling our experience unplugging and attempting to deep read an except from Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur. Nicholas Carr tells us we have lost the ability to do deep read in “is Google making us stupid?” Is this true?
To be quite honest, I could not bring myself to unplug until I was going to sleep at 5AM this morning, after a long day of work I figured I would do the reading and go to bed…I got a few pages in, and next thing I know I was waking up in a pile of papers strewn all over my bed. Ok, time for a regroup, that last strategy failed. I knew that I woke up and stepped off of my bed it would be impossible for me to do. So, I gathered all the papers and started reading again. I must say, Carr makes a good argument…I have not tried to read like that since maybe my freshman year in high school…I would not get into the groove of deep reading, I couldn’t find a comfortable position to be in and the young kids at the end of the street were screaming at the top of their lungs…A few pages in I found myself reading it, but thinking about something else. Regroup again, I was finally able to read the whole thing, and a little of it over again, with NO distractions. Quite amazing really. Have I lost the ability to deep reed as Carr suggests all together? No, however its definitely not an on-demand service anymore.
I think what has happened, is that the internet has taught us to communicate in a different way, a way in which we skim over information and grab what we deem is relivant, I think that is what Carr is saying, in fact, in his article “The amorality of Web 2.0″ , he reinforces that statement by saying the quality of reading we are doing has decreased greatly. He talks about, Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur As he states that web 2.0 could be bad for us, once more.
I have gone way over my allotted blogging and reading time allocations today. Off to class.