I'm sorry. What?

In his Wired Magazine article "The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains", Nicholas Carr brings science to one of my personal theories as an educator, heretofore based only on anecdotal evidence  (And one I previously based on correlation and not causation, that old bugaboo we soft scientists and armchair philosophers favor.) What is this theory?Bottom line, kids’ reading comprehension is compromised due to the internet.

It’s tough as a teacher to get even “bright” kids to read. I had a student today say that the problem with “Tale of Two Cities” is that it just had way too many words in it. Another recently opined that being a lawyer is a “wordy, boring profession” although he conceded “you can make a lot of money at it.”  Still another said that she had no trouble a few years ago reading for four hours (she actually does like “Tale of Two Cities”) but now simply doesn’t have the concentration. She is all of 16, maybe.

“The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it,” says Carr. And it provides an experience that permits shifting one’s focus — just click to another site — when one’s attention wanders (or when one feels that somethings is God forbid “boring”. I wonder if this is a word that has changed its meaning over time.) There is no opportunity to develop discipline, or any kind of mental “stick-to-it-iveness” that may build character but certainly will provide additional time to absorb material or, as Carr notes, learn it at all. Sometimes to comprehend and appreciate new information, we need time, a sleeper effect, a chance to shift our mental gears. But the sheer volume of information available to the brain via the internet results in what Carr names as cognitive load — or perhaps more closely cognitive overload —and the depth to which understanding can take place is threatened.

In a classroom, of course, there is no other site to switch to — at least not as long as the students don’t have laptops with internet access available to them. Education is beginning to learn how it can as a profession create pedagogical styles and learning experiences that engage these learners. It must. We teachers could complain all we want about this phenomenon, but it is out there. We biblio and logophiles lament about something else though, of course. True, it is easy enough to come by new information, but to hold a book in your hand, feel its pages, or savor the prose of anyone who takes the time to craft words are activities that have almost become anachronistic. The real has become virtual, a strange sort of metaphysical downloading, an inverse the full consequences of which we have yet to see in the classroom or anywhere else, for that matter.