The internet changes our thinking!

Have you ever thought of how the internet might be changing your thinking or how you process information? In the most recent 'Du', a Swiss cultural publication, this was exactly the topic and the findings are surprising. According to the author Nicolas Carr, using the internet makes us constant information seekers or scanners. We do not read a whole article anymore. On the contrary, we scan books and magazine articles like we scan websites. Our eyes quickly zigzag the article and our brain tries to filter interesting words or pieces of information. The result is that many people have stopped reading whole books or articles. They only cross-read them in order to scan for interesting information. At the same time we have become better and better at multi-tasking. While we are talking to our parents on Skype we answer emails and check out our favorite blogs. We have become experts in processing lots of data. It is all about speed. We have become novelty-junkies who can quickly discard non-interesting information (a bit like surfing the TV channels). Nicholas Carr thinks that this quick-scanning and multi-tasking behavior helps in processing lots of information and signals but it hinders us from being creative. We can't concentrate long-enough anymore as we have become novelty-junkies. One could say that we have forgotten to sit back and ruminate things.