Sunday, January 25, 2009
Mountains and Technology: Reading Week 2
A few summers ago at about 4 a.m. you could find me ascending the peak of a mountain in Colorado. The sun had just risen above the horizon. Shades of pinks and yellows consumed my vision. The air was crisp at the dawn of a new day.
Those few days will never escape me, because there is something strangely intimate about being out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing. There were no cell phones ringing to the latest music hit, no internet around to distract my mind for brief, fleeting moments. Technology was nowhere to be found. Interestingly enough it is always times like those in Colorado that I have been the happiest.
We live in an age where you have to drive for miles upon miles just to escape the realm of technology. Because people have inundated themselves with information and "easy access" through Google and other search engines, minds seem to lose grip when it comes to actually reading and enjoying articles and books. I completely agree with the comments about skimming information that is more than a few paragraphs long and not absorbing it made by Bruce Friedman in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" I can honestly say that I do the same thing. My attention span has become shorter and shorter through the different outlets of the internet. At any one moment I could be reading an article from The New York Times, and then switch over mid-sentence to Facebook to look through newly posted pictures of my friends. It amazes and scares me how quickly my mind seems to shift gears, and not truly soak up the information at hand.
As much as I am distracted, I will never stop loving the act of reading a great novel I can hold in my hands as I turn the pages one at a time. I know this because every time I finish a book I always want to know more. I become so overwhelmed with the sensation of actually feeling like I am a part of the story, witnessing every scene. To me, that will never fade. No matter what sociologists and academics say about losing touch due to technology, that feeling when a book comes to a close is so much stronger. It is like reaching the peak of a mountain, overlooking everything else in sight.
Great pieces of information and beautifully written articles or books will always be there. It is just filtering through the falsities to find them that is the hard part.
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