The challenge: Can you last a week without reading any media outlet, publication, online forum, or blog? Better yet, could you abstain from Facebook, Twitter, Matador, or whatever social networking site you frequent? If you think you can, you are one of the few. It certainly can be done, but not without some discomfort and a slight feeling of disconnect from the world. The obsession with information and consumption has penetrated our society for quite some time now. Employees have become so obsessed with information that many companies have started to block certain sites in order to ensure that employees aren’t surfing the net instead of doing their job. Even those efforts are thwarted since more and more people have a Black Berry or iPhone, which provide constant access to an endless supply of knowledge at any time of day. Most of us need information, we crave it. We want it now, and we want it short and pithy.
Last year Nicholas Carr wrote an article for The Atlantic where he asks his readers, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Suddenly a former literary major in college found himself skimming articles and avoiding novels. It became difficult to paying attention to things that once kept his interest so profoundly. I was also an English Literature major and the current owner of a bookcase full of books that I used to spend hours reading. Now between changing careers, keeping up online and with life in general, I find the task of finishing a novel rather daunting. In fact, the time when I get most of my reading done is when I travel. I personally feel that traveling allows me to put aside some responsibilities, in particular social media, and just experience, without worrying about everything else.
Claiming that the internet and Google are making consumers stupid, is a false and bold statement meant to catch the reader’s attention. I wouldn’t call someone stupid because they read five online newspapers per day and have over 1000 subscriptions in their Google Reader; however that same person probably skims through most articles in order to read more, know more. They aren’t lazy and they certainly aren’t stupid, but rather less anchored than media consumers 10 years ago. There is merely too much information saturating our short attention spans.
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