The Roots of Community Education

The article explores how the advent of google-aided internet surfing, hyperlinking, and social networking is decreasing our mind’s attention span.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Trying to complete my last 2 classes for my education degree this past spring semester has been admittedly, quite a challenge. It wasn’t until reading this article that I realized how different the mental activity is between my English course, which is novel reading and essay writing focused, with ECMP which is web-surfing, social networking and blog focused. Maybe my inability to keep up with blogs, commenting, tech tasks, my final project, along with readings and essays from my other class might have something to do with the fact that my mind is being asked to immerse myself in two very different kinds of activities.

I don’t think my mind is adapting very well to the demands of both kinds of activities. I struggled to keep my balanced frame of mind throughout the course. Being in front of a computer for too long makes me feel sick. However, not getting my school work all finished up on time does not leave me with a very a good feeling either. There’s got be a better way to balance this all…

The front cover of the latest Adbusters Magazine encapsulates exactly how I’m feeling these days…

Come summer, I think I need to take a holiday from my computer for at least a week!