Books vs the internet

The advent of the internet has sparked a new debate between those who are unrestrained welcomers of new technology and those who cling to the old ways of doing things. But sometimes the new is not necessarily the best.

Internet has over the past few years turned people away from reading to skimming, from reflection to quick judgements based on limited knowledge. Worse they have bred a feeling that like American food more is better. You need to be constantly in the know of what is going on through the internet, twitter facebook and if you miss even a moment of this incessant chatter, you are doomed to ignorance and social inadequacy. 114 letters are supposed to lead you to knowledge nirvana and breakthrough insights!

It is only recently that book publishers have started to mount a rearguard action on this insidious invasion. Recent research shows that having books and reading them improves the mind. In an experiment, researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

This study along with many others, illustrates the tremendous power of books, asserts David Brooks in his new column. We already knew that kids who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better. This new study suggests that introducing books into homes that may not have them also produces significant educational gains.

And how does the internet compare? Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina and found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.Nicholas Carr’s book,in his new book “The Shallows" argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture and cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.

But there is an upside to the internet revolution that we must not forget. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation. The Internet can help you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends.

But the book world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher. It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.

Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic — a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is the ethic of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption — and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.