The other day I was doing some research on the bankruptcy of Borders. Most of what I found was the same string of repeated facts: they had poor management, they couldn’t compete with Amazon, their music section was going under because everyone buys off itunes now – normal economic problems for a corporation. While this came as no surprise, there were a couple random spots on the web where a rogue economist or literary person offered something of much more interest: the idea that people rarely read whole books anymore. Instead, all we care about is excerpts – summations, pivotal points, the main idea.
I remember before I ever got a laptop, I could easily kill five solid books in a matter of days. But on a weekly basis, I’ve now given up a handful of books for hundreds of online articles, excerpts, memes, and statuses. It’s true what researchers say about literate people in the 21st century: we read more now than we ever did. However, everything we read now is fragmented. We barely start from the beginning of something or read it to the end. Will you make it to the end of this article?
This is the age of information. Perhaps that’s the problem. There is simply too much information available and we certainly can’t go through it all – so we pick out what’s important. We pick out fragments that represent the whole and shrug away the rest as details. I mean it makes sense, doesn’t it? As intellectuals or literary types, we pride ourselves not on material property, but on what we know, on how much worthwhile knowledge we’ve managed to retain in our brains. In order to do this, we don’t have time to sift through whole books anymore – or even whole articles on the Internet. Intellectually, we need to keep up with the Jones’ right? Even if that means deeming an excerpt of something as knowledge of the whole thing.
But then the question begs: If you are just reading the excerpt, are you really gaining knowledge of the whole? Suppose a high school student is too busy to read the assigned book, Frankenstein. They look up a summary on SparkNotes and find out that Victor suffered immensely because of his decision to abandon his creation, the monster. Moral of the story: take responsibility of your actions. It’s easy to find a few sentences explaining the entire plot and moral lesson of most books. But just because that student can articulate the moral of the story, does that mean he actually learned it?
The same could be said for a full grown adult. How often do we find ourselves with fifteen tabs open on our browser for hours at a time, reading dozens of articles (hardly finishing any), and scrolling through tons of memes? When it’s all said and done, how much of it do we actually remember? How many fragments of so many different wholes will stick in our brain?
The Internet and the information age seemed like a great way for everyone to become a renaissance man – having a little expertise in almost every field. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I’m not here to be a grumpy old man shaking his finger at technology. I just think the way we absorb information is changing rapidly and is worth some discussion. In the days of old, we spent more time reading whole books – soaking up so many details and fragments about one idea that we knew that idea inside and out. Now, however, we seem to be moving towards a holographic method of learning – a method where a fragment of a story or idea can represent the whole thing. This method is exponentially faster, but does it really work for creating strong, lasting knowledge?