A lot of us like to spend most of our
“reading life” on the internet nowadays. Thirty years ago, a person would spend
the majority of their reading time with a newspaper, a religious text, or a
book. Then along came the computer and things slowly began to shift towards
hurting your eyes by reading from this large glaring grey box.
I remember when I was in secondary school
in the late 90s and I started to use Encarta 95. I would be given some homework
on Henry VIII and instead of the local library; I went to the computer in the
spare room. My mum would mutter at me that I should go to a library because
they have many books with lots of information. Even with the limited resource
of Encarta and at such a young age, I still scoffed at the suggestion. Encarta
95 had the answers and it was so much easier, more accessible, and most
importantly - it had a copy and paste option. Encarta may have had the answers
for a 12 year old but at this time, it wasn’t particular useful for many adults.
So they didn't use it. It was left in the capable hands of the kids who were
becoming very comfortable with searching for information and manipulating it
clearly using Word.
The teachers were quick to catch on to
Encarta so you learnt from a young age to plagiarise well. An important lesson
that proves very useful when progressing through school and onto higher
education. Then along came the internet, or at least the internet that
resembles somewhat the wealth of information that is on there today. Essays became
about Google searches, plagiarising other people’s work in a coherent way that
answered the relevant question, while adding your tiniest bit of insight into
the solution. We became experts at skimming and summarising.
Not only did we use computers for work, it
started to become our main source of information on all things. An endless
volume of knowledge that rivals the world’s greatest library available at our
fingertips for a tiny cost. We now have more information available to us,
whenever we want it, than at any other point in the history of humankind. You
want to learn something, it’s on the internet and if it isn’t, someone will put
it up for you. Let that sink in for a moment… We have access to so much useful
information, which we could use to change the world, right now in front of us.
Yet we use this time to read about celebrity gossip and read articles by idealistic
writers.
This mountain of knowledge was unthinkable
for Tom Average 20 years ago, let alone 60 years ago. No wonder how overwhelming
my parents find the internet.
And what’s even crazier is we don’t just
use the internet for information. We use it for everything: shopping, news, marketing,
music, TV, friends, dating, events – the list is literally endless. But I
digress, I want to talk about how the rapid expansion of the internet in the
last 10 years has revolutionised the way we consume text.
We are now bombarded with choice for where
we get our written information. It’s no longer Encarta, a real encyclopaedia, a
newspaper, or a library that we have to choose from. For something like a film
review, we have dozens of ways of checking information. We have IMDB, Rotten
Tomatoes, and a host of others, as well as bloggers and the scores of news
networks with media divisions. Who do we choose? Well we form certain
favourites for things, such as YouTube for videos – unless it’s only hosted on
another site like Vimeo. These alliances with websites are temporary but
strong. YouTube is my first stop on the music video search and will be for a long
time I think. This alliance may eventually break away if a rival service comes
along – maybe something that incorporates YouTube and all of the other video
sites in a convenient and easy way.
When it comes to reading text and by text I
mean current news, and “old” information. “Old” information being ideas that
have been around for a while and are not related to current events, such as
philosophy or established science. Now when it comes to “old” information, I
think we read the volume of information we find interesting and necessary to
answer our original query. Unless we enjoy the writing style, we read the bare
minimum to answer the question. I think this a big difference when compared to
how we used to find information from books. We haven’t invested into the
webpage so we have less motivation to finish reading all the available
information. The investment we made before the internet could be financial by
buying a book or even just investing our time into going to the library to
search out this understanding. All we do now is click.
This instant and abridged version of events
presented by websites breeds a short attention span. Just like using Encarta,
we are taking exactly what we need and nothing more. Often we don’t continue to
read in more depth because not only have we zero investment in the webpage, but
there is this endless source of data available to me. Why read more on this
subject when there are millions of other things I can learn about!? Thirty
years ago, you might have finished reading the entire explanation in an
encyclopaedia, or studied in more depth the theory of evolution, just because
you had invested time into finding the source of knowledge.
The source is right there now, it’s called
Google and it can get you about 13,920,000,000 results in 0.17 seconds with
seven soft button pushes. You can then just read the synopsis, get the gist,
and your imagination feels in the details. Or more commonly the details are
never filled in, they are lost. I think a consequence of this attention deficit
and abridged version of the story is that we lose out on our focus and
concentration of that particular subject. We have found the answer in 0.17
seconds and read it in 10 seconds. This rapid way of answering questions has a consequence;
it doesn’t have time to stay in our long term memory. It is forgotten before it is accurately analysed. It’s in one synapse and out the other.
I wonder if this type of information intake
has caused a generation of people who find it difficult to concentrate for long
periods. I know I do. No wonder all these kids have attention deficit
disorders. They have been born into the instant internet age. Another consequence
of this is the instant gratification age we are now in as well. Do you remember
when you couldn’t remember who was in a film? You’d recall the actor’s name
days later and phone up your friend to tell them. There was great satisfaction
in diving into the realms of your mind to retrieve that knowledge. Now it’s a
simple search and the answer is there. An instant gratifying moment – very common
to the 21st century person.
My final concern over this new type of
learning and reading is for the writers and articles themselves. As a writer
you are forced to come up with a snappy summary in your first paragraph and an
even snappier title. How many times have you clicked on a link because of a
witty title? I do it all the time. And let’s not forget that clicks = cash. My
favourite recent headline was a BBC article called Nazi Buddha 'came from outer space'. How can you not click that!? It could easily be a real life fourth
Indiana Jones storyline… and there is no way that this article can be worse
than that film. No way.
In order to entice us – the scavengers of
news – the articles must have a clever title. That is something I have noticed
from the response I get from my own writing in relation to a snappy title. This
title obsession can devalue a story, especially one about a complicated issue,
but worse it can mislead about the content.
The twitter-verse is a bizarre world of 140
characters and this means that snappy titles are all you have. So sometimes a
jokey news article title can turn into a hot bed of confusion. A serious debate
can break out because people have misunderstood a title and invented a fabrication.
They have then spread this fabrication and before long, people are reading
tweets as facts. Tweets are thoughts. And thoughts are not facts. An example of
this misunderstanding is when a “joke” news website posts a ridiculous
headline, which is obvious satire, but eventually is copied and passed on to someone who takes it at face value.
It happened to me with a fake satirical Sky
Sports News account on twitter. Sky Sports are my go-to sports news internet alliance
so I trust them. So an account using their brand has tricked me… No harm done
because I found out, but what if I hadn’t. I would’ve looked like a fool in
this instance. But how about when it comes to something more serious than John
Terry being a white c***. I can get fooled and not realise it and then I have
this idea in my head, which I may even share with others, and I don’t even know
that it’s codswallop.
Do you remember that story about Samsung
paying their fine from Apple in coins? It was bullshit but it got reported on a
number of news networks, including the Guardian. It stemmed from a fake story
that spread on twitter and made it on to our trusted news outlets. It’s still available
to read on news websites over a month later. This Samsung coin story is
a great example of a successful meme. I’m not talking meme, like breaded cats,
I’m talking meme in terms of an idea that spreads. Therefore a successful meme
is one that spreads far and high. A story about Apple and Samsung with the
concept of paying a billion dollar fine in coins is a very infectious and
sharable idea.
The internet is making us read and learn
about things that make catchy titles. 24 hour news entertainment networks are capitalising on this and are dumbing down or more frequently humouring up titles
for this exact reason. We are far removed from the time where we bought a book
on a subject and read the thing in its entirety. We just want the gist, the story in a nutshell please.
Tl;dr: We are no longer investigative explorers of knowledge, we are short study learners looking for our quick fix. We have become slaves to slogans.
