It seems pretty innocuous the way internet works. The source and pile of knowledge at our fingertips. Want to know about the koalas? Google it. Want to know about the Bill Clinton affairs? Google it. Want to know the national anthem of Uruguay? Google it. Any other question which you are lingering on? Google it. Want to settle a bet? What better way to show the evidence than sending a hypertext link. Ah! Internet you beauty. The whole world just wants to put its head in your chasms and feel you from inside out.
Except it comes at enormous costs.
People are walking away from reading textbooks and why wouldn’t they if they can get the same world-changing stuffs in a few paragraphs written in the form of blogs. “Books are just so boring. They take forever to get to the point“, say the teenagers. “I prefer blogs where the same knowledge is condensed. Easy to read. Easy to digest“.
I must admit that the reading pile of each of us is shambolic. We are millions of lines behind where we should be in terms of our reading requirements no matter what we do. We still manage to hold on because we have power of blogs and hypertext-links. “What a wonderful invention Internet is“, you blurt out in the middle of your sleep.
Over Memory: For memories to consolidate, the synapses have to send proper information through dendrites and stuff like that. It requires focus and concentration on the stuff you are reading. The short-term memory must go all the way to the long-memory and proper repetition is required. But, with internet around hardly any of us really care about memory. We are happy to look up the information as we go on. We fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t need to remember stuffs to move ahead.
This is a terrible mistake.
For creativity and innovation to happen, you do need things in your working memory. Though I won’t argue that knowing the names of all presidents and their personal lives gives you any competitive edge, but it does help if you are trying to write a survey on the subject. It is just too damn difficult to get your ideas together if you have to look them up every time. For example: You need to remember the atomic numbers of elements if you are really trying to split atoms. You really need to know the existing stuffs pretty well if you want to build on top of them.
When you are reading a web page, the general tendency is to skim the article unless it is short. Next time when you browse through a page, keep track of the following: How many pages did you actually go through deeply? How many were you able to understand to the best of your abilities? Can you recall the information you just read on the web if needed? Ask yourself and answer. You will be surprised to see how bad most of us do.
Reading a conventional book requires decluttering of mind, a free mindset as you prepare yourself to gain the knowledge. That helps in preparing your brain towards what is coming and how to receive it. That is the exact stuff memory needs. FOCUS. You start something from scratch and keep going linearly through books and stop when you are tired or have had enough. You revisit them, quiz yourself and it ultimately consolidates into your memory. Reading a web page is mostly superfluous. You often don’t know what is about to happen. The constant scroll on the digital screen, not to mention so many tabs open in your browser which creates additional pressure to finish the current tab quickly and jump on to the next one. There is a famous saying, “A person who is everywhere, is actually nowhere.” In order to move through stuffs fast, you often multi-task and switch back-and-forth between the tabs, skimming and scrolling and ultimately very little gets done.
Superficial knowledge: Reading a bunch of stuffs online often results in overconfidence effect. Imagine you have browsed through the articles on some topic for an hour or so and read all the articles on first two pages on google search. It often leads to illusion that we’ve got a solid grasp on the topic. Then comes the tests and you bomb them. I have seen it happen. Multiple times.
One more whip please: Internet addiction is not like other substance addiction. No physical harm is being done. None is getting hurt(and it is perfectly legal). But the symptoms of internet addiction closely resembles to cocaine or meth addicts. According to Oxford dictionary, Addiction is defined as the involuntary action which compels us to do the task over and over again despite knowing its malicious effects. Have you ever found yourself in any of the following situations: You are unable to sleep even after 30 minutes of going to bed. Suddenly you take out the smartphone and start browsing through Facebook. or you are getting late for a class and all you want to do is to check your favorite team’s score the last time before you walk into the dreadful hell of the classroom. When waiting in queue for food or some other work, you would rather check your emails than being mindful of your surrounding.
If answer to any of these questions is Yes, then you are addicted to internet.
And you must break your addiction soon. Believe me when I say this: Internet is the silent killer of time and years later when looking back, you will often have no idea where the hell your time went.
There is typically around 2.5 billion seconds in an average human life. The way you spend them will determine the entire texture of your existence and of any evidence that you were ever here. Do you really want to spend them looking at some stupid website? Is any website worth your dream? Think about this. Now.
People often say, “Time flies by.” The good news is that: “You are the pilot“.
To Infinity and Beyond... 