“World
of Good” Social-Impact Report 2006, http://www.worldofgood.com/impact/index.shtml
A
“social-impact report”? We
have heard of “environmental-impact report”;
for example, one has to be filed with regard to the disposition of
our Montebello Hills before a decision be made about the hills.
A social-impact report would talk about the probable and possible
social consequences of a planned or existing activity.
What
consequences do you see from the following?
In the previous part, we looked at the usefulness of a
social-impact report with regard to the definition of marriage.
Below we look at the effect of the Internet on us and the usefulness
of such a report with regard to the Internet.
For me, as for
others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the
information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The
advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of
information are many, and
they’ve been widely described
and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s
Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But
that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed
out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They
supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And
what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for
concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects
to take in information the way the
Net distributes it: in a swiftly
moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.
Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. ...
Anecdotes alone
don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and
psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how
Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online
research habits, conducted
by scholars from
University
College
London
, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we
read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars
examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular
research sites, one operated by
the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide
access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources
of written information. They found
that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,”
hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source
they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages
of an article
or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes
they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went
back and actually read it. The authors of the study report: ...
...“We are not
only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at
Tufts
University
and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading
Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf
worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts
“efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our
capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier
technology, the printing press,
made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she
says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to
interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read
deeply and without distraction,
remains largely disengaged. ...
Nicholas Carr, July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly,
"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
July 24, 2008