At the beginning of this school year, I was asked to list all the books that I had read outside of school since the ninth grade. Earlier I had thought that I was going to fill up an entire paper with patrician titles, but as I pondered the question, I realized that my list was disappointingly short.
Recently I've noticed that many of my fellow students have great trouble in reading any sort of thing assigned in school. They feel a great sense of exasperation when they pick up a passage to read, and eventually decide to ask a friend for a summary or read a related study guide.
While it may very well be that this is the result of general laziness or lethargy, I think the rapid pace of information generation caused by technology turns us off from the unchanging book or pamphlet. We feel that we need to "stay on top of things" and are glued to our email inboxes, clickbait websites, and instant messaging chats. Transient media has a dynamism that attracts us and often character limits or some other length constraint that prevents any single article from extending past the limits of our attention spans. All of this fits in perfectly with the fast, jerky pace of modern life that allows us little time to sit quietly and read a book.
When we try to do just that, the bombardment of distractions still exists. Admittedly, not all of it is inferior to printed texts and nor are printed texts often superior. But the result is that we do not cultivate our minds to hold a thought for very long. It is easy to get swept away in the tide of new material and allow ourselves to be indoctrinated by it when we are not preserving our own thoughts.
Beyond the inability to sit still and read a book, there lies this real danger to which my peers and I have been highly susceptible. Wherever our gushing stream of content finds its source, we gravitate. When we are there, we are encouraged to take upon the collective opinion of those who have also gathered. When we exit that bubble of influence, we are obliged to defend and accept fully those attitudes as our own beliefs. And in the entire process, we have not taken enough time to evaluate the values we have chosen to accept nor develop our own because the process itself has occurred so quickly. These ideals are like fast-food, gained so conveniently that we may feel that it is not worth working towards original and critical thought. We risk becoming little more than part of a collective mind that projects its errors of reasoning onto each of us when it inevitably fails.
So where should technology go from here? I enjoy that it allows me to connect with all sorts of places and people with a few clicks and allows me to access all sorts of educational websites and software, but I think we should spend a bit more time plugged off and out of our comfort zone. Only then will we be able to allow ourselves to sink more deeply into the thought which we need to be come independent thinkers who can choose the travails and triumphs we need to become better people.
