It’s not something new for me to write about – in fact, most of my writing has centered around the constant conflict I feel between technology and… well, just about everything else. I am, at heart, a technology person. By no stretch am I a Luddite, as a Beowulf cluster of Pine64s a few feet away shows.

Our technology seems to continue to surpass our humanity, which really isn’t anything new. But it has become more prevalent and less noticeable because of it’s very nature.

I wrote recently on LinkedIn about technology, democracy and ethics. Almost a month later, “How Technology Disrupted the Truth“¹ was written about the Brexit vote in Europe… or the part that wants to be a former part that isn’t yet. As I’ve puttered around Facebook between studying, reading and not-writing-enough, I’ve noted a few other things.

People aren’t just having issues related to their writing – they’re having trouble with their reading comprehension. I read about it and went introspective about it. I’ve been writing less over the last few years, true, but I also noted that my writing mistakes had increased – and my capacity to find them required me to not be interacting with the Internet. That’s me, and it’s impossible to extrapolate anything of use from my own experience², but I see it in all sorts of things from people I know.

And then we get into the misleading headlines that have been popping around social networks, that people share without even considering the larger impact it will have. Where gossip has always been a human problem, we not only have increased it exponentially – we’ve made it a solid business model for clickbait companies.

Some say that all of this is even making us stupid, which is a catchy headline, but for those who make the effort to read the link:

…What we seem to be sacrificing in our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion. The rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which pump out streams of brief messages, has only exacerbated the problem.

There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. What’s disturbing is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself — our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the net’s treasures, we have been blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture…

Skimming doesn’t really help with critical thought when clickbait headlines travel faster than the speed of light. So what’s the answer?

Slow down. Don’t read everything. And take the trouble to read actual writing instead of the drivel that passes for it… if you can tell the difference in modern writing anymore.

¹ And I’m tired of letting ‘disruptive’ being batted around so much; I’ll write about that on KnowProSE.com.
² People who write knowing that would lead to an intense recovery of memory usage on the Internet, I’m sure. We’re all individuals but not one of us has an omniscient perspective.