Interpretation Through a Critical Lens, Essay Example

The coming of the computer era has changed everything in terms of reading and writing. Further, the internet and Google, to be specific, came in and changed the way of our thinking. Everything made easy, and whatever difficult word or phrase, or anything new that one would wish to know found immediately with ease through Google. May researchers have gone deeper into the field to find out the truth and the science underlying the computer era and the new person built in ourselves upon living with respect to the computer era.

““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.”

Our brains meant to think and come up with something tangible, but in this era, the computer thinks for us.  The brain is tinkering with and can no longer think the way it used to think. Take, for example, the way one could read a lengthy book in the olden days. Nowadays, it different, and one can only read a few pages and become fed up. The concentration drifts and one start imagining how convenient it could have been if the writing were in soft copy. Probably one could have scrolled the mouse through the material and gotten the main idea, highlighted the essential words and phrases. Work is restrained and one could make a quick summary through a lengthy piece of work. The neural circuitry remapped as one does not focus on taking the time to think outside the box. “The computer will do it for me”, is the common phase. The memory reprogrammed.

The movie marks yet other method that has changed the reading style are the videos. Nowadays, movies made out of novels, and lengthy stuff. A student would prefer watching the video form of a book rather than spending time to read it. What happens to such a student, for example? Of course, the plot and theme of the book gotten clearly, but the writing style becomes difficult to find out. Such students would simply browse through the substitutes of the novel, for example, the content pages, abstract, and think they well understand the book. While such students would have confidence of saying they can handle questions of such a set book in an exam situation, they would be surprised of a poor performance.

In the olden days, researchers would spend hours in the library trying to fish out information from earlier written books, but what happens nowadays? A researcher simply goes online, surfs and searches for the necessary information. Research that required several days to complete in earlier days now doable in minutes. The internet is truly heaven sent, as researcher would say. To make matters lot more easily there are quick hyperlinks that one directed to in case the information on that particular page was not sufficient. Some links have even gone a step ahead to provide videos or audible information to make matters easy for the poor readers.

The internet is a universal medium through which information flows. The mail is the most efficient, reliable, cheap and the most famous way through which people pass messages nowadays. The olden days when people could draft letters are long gone.  If for example today, one required writing a letter, the possibility of lacking a pen or a piece of the paper is exceptionally high. One could prefer using the keyboard and the readily available piece of Ms Word office page. The liability of sending the letter is 100% through the mail. One can even get immediate response after the recipient receives it unlike the earlier days when post offices could take days to deliver the letter to the recipient, with the risk of loss of the letter. Post offices in some nations have even closed down due to lack of customers. The message not necessarily in written form, as one could decide to send visual messages or an audio message. This has further corrupted our reading abilities.

The social sites as face book, Skype, snaptu,2go, and twitter among others has had a extremely negative effect on the way of our reading. One can chat with a friend through short texts. If given a whole paragraph or page to read, such persons could find it difficult as they are used to chatting through short messages. The short messages further shortened by shortening almost every other word. Such a culprit could find it difficult or ambiguous to handle a set book for example. The newspaper could be a burden, while the way of thinking of such a person would be different. While some other person would find it worthwhile to read a newspaper, the internet and short massage culprit would find it wastage of time.

Studies show that a lot of readers and writers have altogether lost their abilities to read.  Bruce Friedman is a blogger in the field of medicine who says it that the use of the internet has altered the way of operation in the medicine field. The mental habits of medical practitioners have changed, thus changing their way of doing work. Doctors, for example, ought to be researchers by default. They should spend their free time researching and reading on any new diseases that probably occurred. It so happens that some of the doctors have almost totally lost the ability to read and at the same time absorb a longish article in print form. What would be the effect of a doctor who simply skims through a documentary about a disease, and goes to handle a patient practically? Probably the most significant step skipped and the likelihood of medical performing medical errors would be high. In search a case, there would be adverse consequences including death of the patient.

In general, the computer, Google, and other internet applications have totally changed our way of thinking. They have affected our ability to read, to concentrate and take time to handle books. Our minds corrupted and all one knows is “it is the work of the computer”. We ought to know that man, made the computer help in doing daily activities, not to suppress our way of thinking. Technology is satisfactory, but the next generation is likely to consist of children, who will never think, as the computer will do the thinking.