When I began to read this article I could relate to the author's probem. I spend more time than I'd like to admit on a website called Reddit.com. This site can be described as the front page of the internet, where information from around the internet is condensed into one place. I have become used to scanning quickly gathering only the imformation I need and leaving any details behind. I found that when reading a long piece of writing I lose focus and tend to re-read the same sentences over and over again. During the reading of this article the only reason I wasn't skimming was because the article stated that skimming was a problem. Had it been anything else I would have looked at important parts and figured enough out to tell what the main idea was.
I was actually surprised that there were as many people, noted by the author, that were in the same boat as me. At first I felt relief knowing that I wasn't the only one with this problem, as well as knowing it was the internet's fault. Hurray, I thought I'm normal and it's not my fault! But who's fault is it that I spend time on the interenet? Is it the pressure of society forcing me to get with it? No, I'm enjoying the interent with the price of lose of attention and reading skill.
"And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
This qoute seemed to be exactly what was happening to me. I made a connection between this and the book 1984 by George Orwell.
"It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course," he added as an afterthought. (1.5.23, Syme)
The quote is a longer read, which to further my point about reading long passages, I listened to through an audiobook and skimmed the internet. How ironic.
I am exactly the resut of what Mr. Carr is talking about in his article.
