Korean Job Discussion Forums

[pugwall]

I know the Op's meaning.I'm a book freak but feel facebook and wikipedia is doing something to my brain.

[redaxe]

The other thing is, I spend so much time sitting at my desk at work, that when I go home from work I don't want to do anything that involves sitting around, including reading a book. I want to go out, get some exercise, and do things.

[metalhead]

Sadly the Internet and drinking cuts into my reading time, but I love books, actual books, too, preferably second-hand.

Sci-fi novels, fantasy novels (proper fantasy, like George R.R. Martin, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe - not that Twilight/Harry Potter rubbish) and the occasional non-fiction book are all that I need, book-wise.

[Triban]

[Louis VI]

[Kepler]

"I can feel it, too. 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."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

I read a book by the same author about the effect that the internet is having on our brains. The internet is turning us into pancake people: our breadth of knowledge greatly exceeds our depth of knowledge. Research shows that the internet trains our brains to better at multitasking. However, one cognitive skill often improves at the expense of another. Although an internet user is good at multitasking, he/she often has more difficulty thinking deeply and creatively about one subject when asked to do so.

[Harpeau]

[winaniw]

Aww, this thread just killed my mood. I'm gonna go find a book.

[drydell]

OP yes - this is a real worry

To the posters who logged on to profess their love of reading and just how many loads of books they read each and every day - yes yes yes that's all very lovely for you - bravo!... but you somewhat missed the point that the OP was making... they didn't post this to declare publicly how much of a philistine they were..(bangs head on table)... It's about the sinister way that long-term internet use is rewiring our brains to degrade our attention spans.
I also think the people who have noticed this shift are the ones ahead of the game here.....

This piece in The Guardian covers the issues well...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/15/internet-brain-neuroscience-debate

Personally I could relate to this particular take on the topic...

Bidisha, writer and critic

The internet is definitely affecting the way I think, for the worse. I fantasise about an entire month away from it, with no news headlines, email inboxes, idle googling or instant messages, the same way retirees contemplate a month in the Bahamas. The internet means that we can never get away from ourselves, our temptations and obsessions. There's something depressing about knowing I can literally and metaphorically log on to the same homepage, wherever I am in the world.

My internet use and corresponding brain activity follow a distinct pattern of efficiency. There's the early morning log-on, the quick and accurate scan of the day's news, the brisk queries and scheduling, the exchange of scripts of articles or edited book extracts.

After all this good stuff, there's what I call the comet trail: the subsequent hours-long, bitty, unsatisfying sessions of utter timewasting. I find myself looking up absolute nonsense only tangentially related to my work, fuelled by obsessions and whims and characterised by topic-hopping, bad spelling, squinting, forum lurking and comically wide-ranging search terms. I end having created nothing myself, feeling isolated, twitchy and unable to sleep, with a headache and painful eyes, not having left the house once.

The internet enables you look up anything you want and get it slightly wrong. It's like a never-ending, trashy magazine sucking all time, space and logic into its bottomless maw. And, like all trashy magazines, it has its own tone, slang and lexicon. I was tempted to construct this piece in textspeak, Tweet abbreviations or increasingly abusive one-liners to demonstrate the level of wit the internet has facilitated � one that is frighteningly easily to mimic and perpetuate. What we need to counteract the slipshod syntax, off-putting abusiveness, unruly topic-roaming and frenetic, unreal "social networking" is good, old-fashioned discipline. We are the species with the genius to create something as wondrous as the internet in the first place. Surely we have enough self-control to stay away from Facebook.

[Privateer]

Actually we're all getting smarter!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_You

[chellovek]

[jack_b57]