My parents have these old friends from their UT/Austin days who moved to Kerrville several decades ago. They are possibly the last surviving genuine hippies. I mean real hippies. They are "off the radar," vegan, don't have "real" jobs or cell phones - or the Internet. They aren't consumers of mainstream media. They come to Austin once a month to shop at Wheatsville and travel to a tiny, remote town in New Mexico a few times a year to stay at their cabin.
You'd think they're behind on the times; stuck idealizing an era when young people were political activists out in the streets protesting Vietnam and "exploring" their intellects by dropping acid.
But these people are the most informed, intellectually curious individuals that I know. They hunt for information, find and order obscure books through the book exchange and make a daily telephone call to who-knows-where to listen to the day's headlines and news stories. Their living room is full of books and article clippings. Sometimes they call my parents to look something up on the Internet, but it's rare.
They say they won't get the Internet because it would become an obsession. They have so many questions and so many interests that it would take up all their time and destroy their tranquil lifestyle. Maybe they're afraid of what Nicholas Carr referred to as his deteriorating attention span because of the way he's been consuming information on the Web for the past decade. But if my parents' friends had the Internet, would their attention span dwindle? Would they no longer be able to read hundreds of books a year? Would it cause them to lose their interest and their curiosity because they would eventually take for granted easy access to information?
From the perspective of a philosophy major, it is an anomaly that the modern phenomenon of easy access to information would result in the drop in quality of education and proverbial hunger for knowledge. It seems to be somewhat the case, but I wouldn't have it any other way and I don't think the Internet or Google are the only factors contributing to today's kids being more stupid or intellectually incurious or illiterate or bad spellers. I must agree with Nicholas Carr, though, in speculating that it may have begun chipping away at our attention span. I've noticed the same thing happening with me, but I can't tell if it's senioritis or if most New York Times articles really are too long (yes..).
Maybe my parents' friends are so curious because they have to work to get information. They certainly have the attention span to read voraciously. Maybe it is because they are from a generation where kids cared more about learning and weren't used to consuming information like jet skiers like Carr says.
While kids may have less of an attention span, I refused to believe we are any less interested in learning. Perhaps it's a psychological condition: We want what isn't easily available to us and take for granted the things that are. In my opinion, that doesn't mean that Google or the Internet is a bad thing and I would never want to go back to a time without either.
There are many factors that contribute to Tara Brabazon's "University of Google." The biggest one that comes to my mind is our mediocre (and even failing) public education system. Students' inability to discern online information seems to be more a failure of our education system than the existence of tools that put a world of information at our fingertips. But like the dwindling attention spans, if the Internet really is posing a problem for information judgment, I believe it can be fixed or even harnessed to make things more efficient, positive and better.
Brabazon admits that the if students were taught to interpret what constitutes quality information and what constitutes fluff, things would be better. From the perspective of a journalism major, increased access to information can never be a bad thing and I completely disagree with limiting student use of Google or Wikipedia during the first year of study. Why can't we teach students to "interpret" information without limiting access to information?
As for the attention span problem, I'd like to think it's senioritis, but I'll admit that Nicholas Carr's theory seems fairly accurate.
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