THE SHALLOWS
Today’s class was very “all over the place” for me honestly. I understood the teachings about how technology has decreased our attention span. I was all about reading in elementary school. I read for fun, at school or at home. The only thing you’ll catch me reading now are online articles about movies or the newest piece of technology that interests me. I will rarely read books that are assigned for class. If I HAVE to read one however, I will NEED the paperback or hardcover version of the book. If it is a pdf file I might as well not even bother with it as there are simply too many ways for me to distract myself. I have countless apps and bookmarks that if I have to read something longer than a few pages on my laptop, it won’t get done, or at least not in a timely manner.
Another issue I deal with when reading is that I cannot read for a long period of time. I’m unsure of what the issue is, but I found reading draining. This is going to contradict some things I stated earlier, but I read, for fun, on my cruise this past summer. Michael Crichton’s “The Lost World” was a fantastic book and I’m extremely surprised that I read on a cruise, especially since, as stated above, I DON’T read for fun. To get through the book however, I had to read chapter to chapter. If I needed to grab another long island ice tea, I would have to wait until I finished the chapter. I was in the zone and I refused to break out of it if I didn’t have to because I knew it would take me awhile to re-immerse myself in the book again. I did however, have to take multiple breaks while reading the novel throughout the week. If I read more than two chapters at a time, I found myself re-reading a few of the pages again because there was so much mental energy being used at once, that I wouldn’t recognize that I wasn’t gaining things from the material that I read.
I would agree with Carr when he stated that technology has decreased our brain capability of being able to focus for longer periods of time. I could play video games or watch movies for hours. The second I’m given something that isn’t directly related with technology, it’s game over. There is no way I would be interested or invested because I just cannot focus.
P.S. Every time the title of Carr’s book “The Shallows” was stated, I would begin to think about the summer shark flick, “The Shallows” which interested me much more.