I refuse to move to electronic books. How many of you, book readers, have switched to kindle? Amazon’s Kindle reader has all the features one could hope for, hundreds of books at your hand, highlighting passages, inserting comments, searching online dictionaries, listening to mp3s, download books, etc… but it also is turning books into hypertext documents and here is the main problem, distractions. Books are being turned into web sites.
I’m reading Pulitzer finalist book “What the Internet is doing to our brains – The Shallows” by N. Carr, and it has opened my eyes very wide to how the Internet and smartphones are causing our brains to be structurally changed; in such a way that we are being trained for instant gratification of finding information quickly and are degenerating, gradually, to a much shorter attention span; and therefore the ability to take a book and read and understand a hundred pages in one sitting; to have the attention span for deep learning, for deep knowledge. Instead we are skimming very quickly documents on the web and learn only superficially. There is a lot more to this than I’m letting on now… If you are at all concerned of how Internet technologies are affecting us and especially our children, you must take the time to read that book I mentioned.
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