The Birkerts, Carr, and Bauerlin articles struck a chord. They all discuss thoughts that I find creepy. Creepy because of how feasible they really are. I also have noticed a higher difficulty in trying to sit down and read longer things since I've started to use the internet more. The scary part? I hadn't even thought of the internet of being a possible cause of my literary laziness until recently. The articles cite some pretty strong evidence to support the anecdotes that does imply that technology and the net really is a negative impact, such as the declining test scores.
It seems that technology has extreme power that is easy for most people to ignore. Maybe because of how easy it makes life and how quickly we can get things "done." Or, at least, that's what I assume in a world where it seems everyone wants to get all work done as quickly as possible to move on to socializing or other responsibilities. (I know plenty of people that work multiple jobs and go to school full time that really just need to get things done quickly to catch up on sleep, rather than just to have more time to goof off, so I don't mean to imply that people are lazy and just don't want to do the work.)
The idea that we should embrace the technology and use it in the classroom as an "advantage" just strikes me as wrong. It seems to me that if you use the same things in the classroom as the students use on their own, we'll just further lose the ability to read longer texts. I think it would be better to teach the skill that they want students to know rather than use the others that aren't as vitally needed skills.
These articles brought me back to high school, when we read Orwell's 1984. Even then, the idea of "newspeak" was a plausible and frightening concept. After these articles, I'm starting to wonder when, rather than if, we will begin using our own form of it. I suppose you could even argue texting abbreviations are the beginnings of it....
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