The Internet: the cause of our stoopidity

It is no secret that students rely on the Internet for everything. Don’t know what the Glorious Revolution is, or what “Doctor Who” is? Google it!

Our web-browsing may seem benign, but with every click on the “search” button, we are submitting to the Internet’s operating system, causing our brains to rewire.

The Internet is not just a teeming pool of information for us to feed off of; it chips away at our mind’s capacities for contemplation and attention. Consequently, we zip along the surface of the its information.

We receive information the way the websites present it, which is in short paragraphs surrounded by hyperlinks and graphics. As a result, we fail to sustain a clear train of thought, constantly jumping from link to link.

Take Wikipedia, for example: On every article, dozens of hyperlinks take us to other pages. Before finishing the paragraph, we are immediately transported from one page to a new one through the click of a hyperlink. Our attention is now divided between multiple pages, not just one. This habit becomes instilled within us, and consequently, we find it difficult to read longer pieces of text and instead skim them.

Sadly, in this modern age, it is nearly impossible to avoid the Internet; it has taken over every aspect of our lives.

An alternative for reading on the online includes reading print books, newspapers or magazines. None of them have hyperlinks and can help prevent this habit of distracted attention from worsening.

Blogger Scott Karp, a lit major and a once “voracious book reader,” confessed in 2008 in The Atlantic that he stopped reading books. He surmises on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the Web not so much because the way I read has changed, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Karp is not the only one who has lost his ability to fully absorb information without being disrupted. Scholars from the University College London conducted a study in which they tracked visitors’ behaviors on databases. They discovered that users exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” reading no more than the first pages of one article before bouncing to another, shortening readers’ attention spans.

The effects of constantly reading online are seen in the studies conducted by The National Center for Biotechnology Information, which claims that the average attention span of a human being has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2013. That’s right, a goldfish has an attention span a second longer than we do.

Not only does using the Internet restrict our concentration, but it also drains our ingenuity.

Its 540 million active users include students who count on sites like SparkNotes for summaries and analyses from their English books. Millions of students no longer have the patience to decode the meanings behind the actual text by themselves and instead find them online.

It is true that the Internet is the most practical choice for answering simple questions such as: “What’s the weather?” With open-ended questions that entail a subjective answer, however, deducing our own answers strengthens our reasoning. As we depend on the Internet to spit out answers, we become less able to form answers on our own.

So the next time you find yourself opening up a browser, close your laptop and pick up a book, magazine or newspaper.