The Owl Has Flown Response

What goes through your mind when you read? Do you read deliberately, looking for certain aspects, or do you read as a blank slate? When reading, professors expect a deliberateness that will help you to uncover meanings that are not readily apparent. Thomas C. Foster in his book “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” expands on this concept. He endeavors to instruct his readers in the way he believes they should read, in order to get the most out of each book. He concedes that, “When lay readers encounter a fictive text, they focus, as they should, on the story and the characters” but to truly read like a professor you must also divert a portion of your attention on

As you read you build a connection with the information. Like circuits on a motherboard, each connection brings together the necessary pieces to process and store information. As you gather more information you will be able to find a deeper meaning, and with that a greater purpose. In Sven Birtkerts essay “The Owl Has Flown” he talks about vertical and horizontal thinking. Vertical thinking, where you focus on one subject. Studying it intensively, at length, becoming an expert or even master of the subject. For only with thorough analysis and examination can one gain wisdom. Whereas horizontal thinking is more the learning many things about a wide variety of different topics. Never fully gaining more than a superficial understanding. Lacking the mastery and expertise you gain with exclusive study and focus. Birkerts feels that with the increase in available knowledge that people would rather skim through information than deeply study a subject. With the explosion of the internet and the multitude of informational resources like magazines, websites, newspapers, etc. I can see how he comes to this conclusion. Birkerts also talks about the impact that our ways of gathering and dispersing information have as it casts a significant influence on our reality. He says, “For how we receive information bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret reality” (31). I feel that there is truth to this statement. For when we take in information we evaluate what we have already

In his writing, Carr explains how his mind has become much more erratic since his use of the internet. “I get fidgety, lose the thread, [and] begin looking for something else to do,” Carr says (572). The availability of information that people have these days is astonishing, and their intake of it is even more considerable. In connection to the information people have access to in our day and age, it has promoted a culture of disinterest and boredom. You are able to see this clearly in a study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London. The subjects displayed “a form of skimming activity,” jumping from source to source. They normally would read no more than one or two pages of a book or article before they would go to another site, seldom returning to any source they had already viewed.

Although its intention was to nourish our minds with an instant unlimited source of valuable information, the internet has caused some people to lose their appreciation for long texts and their ability to concentrate. Within the essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, the author feels that someone has been tinkering with his brain and that he can no longer enjoy reading a book of any length because he cannot sustain concentration on the book (Carr 1). This is a result of the fact that when people use the internet to find information, they habituate themselves to skim along the lines to quickly allocate their answers and once they have gotten what they needed, they close the browser without any further analysis of the information.

There is no denying the incredible library of knowledge the internet has made readily available for all to use. Having such a resource is transforming modern society in many ways, as it brings insight and news across the world at a moment’s notice, all the while enhancing educational and technological advancements. However, according to Sven Birkets, an American essayist and literacy critic, in his essay, “The Owl Has Flown”, it is not without fault as observations are to be made on how this new resource has transformed people’s intelligence and wisdom. The author theorizes that the large, almost unlimited, library that is now being offered by services such as the internet, reshapes the public’s knowledge. Knowledge is transformed to be horizontal or insubstantial compared to the much deeper lateral understanding pertaining to older generations because of the amount of time they spent dwelling on a much smaller set of resources. This observation made by Birkets in the late 90’s is expanded upon, and modernized by Nicholas Carr, an American writer and author, in a more inflicting and self-reflecting article for The Atlantic magazine entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains”. Carr does not just blame the Google search engine in this claim, but the internet as a whole on how it impacts concentration and our ability to contemplate. These cognitive impacts are observed and explained in more scientific terms by Eric Jaffe, a regular Observer

Many researches has been performed, showing a new type of reading. Many people today do not read the article or passage, they just skim the entire information given for key information.

In The Shallows Carr includes a tale of Phillip Davis, a doctoral student, introducing his friend to the internet and becoming frustrated when his friend kept pausing to read web pages she found. Davis recounts, “ ‘You’re not supposed to read web pages, just click on the hypertexted words!’ ”(Carr 7). This statement may seem brash but it is not wrong, the Internet is not the ideal environment for individuals who want to pause and assess ever bit of information given, if that were the case one would turn on his or her computer to write an email and within three hours have gotten nowhere. From all the pop ups, side ads, and recommendations along a web page taking the time to evaluate each and every bit of information would take ages, and this discourages a mentality of linear reading and full analysis. Moreover, Carr describes how an Israeli company allows users to view the amount of time people spent on their website from around the world, the result showed that now matter were they were located they all spent a minimal amount on each website before clicking away. Carr states, “ On the Web, there is no such think as leisurely browsing. We gather as much information as quickly as our eyes and fingers can move”(Carr

In Carr’s article, the author advocates for, “deep reading.” After reading Carr’s article, I arrived at the conclusion that “deep reading” is a skill that requires someone to actively read a piece of work, literature, or some other text in a meticulous, pensive, and unhurried manner without being distracted. This skill is used to completely and thoroughly analyze and interpret the material being read. To illustrate, Carr states that “immersing [himself] in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy” (324). Carr no longer, “[gets] caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument” (324). Rather, he loses focus and interest in the material he is reading. This is similar to what most people do ever since technology has become more advanced.

People no longer deep read. Reading is more skimming. Doing extensive research nowadays is going all the way to page 2 of Google search results. Research it much faster now. You no longer have to go to a library. Just a quick Google search will give you all the information you need. The internet has changed the way we consume information. Why read a book on a topic when you can watch a fifteen minute YouTube video and get the same information? One of my Computer Science professors has gone the entire semester without writing a single line of code. He just reads the textbook to the class and assumes we understand the material. If it was not for the fact that I can learn the material from a short web series, It would be extremely difficult for me to grasp the concepts and information. The internet has provided us with a fast and efficient way to consume information. We live in a world where everyone is on the go nowadays, everyone is in a rush. Everything needs to be faster. Why would we read a book when we can get the important parts from SparkNotes? We live in a time when we don’t want our time wasted, just give us the bullet points. We only want the information that we need to

This general knowledge that one can only achieve by reading everyday writing is also rising on the internet. According to Doug Gross, the author of source D, “researchers all over the world” can look into “topics ranging from the rise of citizen journalism to tracking vaccination rate to predicting stock market activity.” (Gross) With the help of international connection from the internet, more people can read everyday writings that are on widely known topics to specific topics like vaccination rates, leading them to solutions for world

Since the invention of the world wide web in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, the global spread of information has become increasingly easy, as more resources become available online. The internet can be a useful tool in research and a great way to accumulate valuable information and knowledge, and can be a medium used to spark intelligent and meaningful discussions, but only if used correctly. Poor navigation of the surplus of content available online can lead to a sinkhole of inaccurate and, frankly, bullshit sources. Attempts at academic communication via online sources can devolve into echo rooms or mindless, childish retorts.

With the impending death of traditional print journalism and the fracturing of television news, new methods have had to be developed for people to acquire and analyze the news about the world that individuals need. People have in increasing numbers turned to the internet to find out what they need, and as we all know there is an immense amount of information to be had from the virtual world. However, again as well all know, the sheer volume of information on the web makes it seem impossible to discern what is truly important. The old gatekeepers (from newspaper editors to the Encyclopedia Britannica) have disappeared without anyone taking their places and so we are left to sort through the information ourselves.

Today, the web grants the people easy accessibility to unprecedented amounts of knowledge. However, a growing body of scientific proof suggests that the web, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is additionally turning society into scattered and superficial thinkers.The Roman thinker Seneca could have place it best 2,000 years ago: "To be all over is to be obscurity" (Carr, 2010).

Edmunds and Morris (2000), suggest that individuals are blasted with information whether the information is sought after or not. Other scholars such as Feather, Fickas, Van Lamsweerde, and Ponsard (1998), suggest that because of the last 50 years in technology advancements, information is more available to more people than another other time in history. While, there are advantages to this unlimited access to information, there are disadvantages as well – information overload (Edmunds & Morris, 2000).

2. Technology is the culprit of a new wave of mental disorders that are developed after birth. Dr. Larry D. Rosen is a professor emeritus and is a former chair of the Department of Psychology at California State University in Dominguez Hills, California and is also an internationally acclaimed expert on how technology affects the mind. Dr. Rosen lists that symptoms of an iDisorder are changes in the way our brains process information and our abilities to connect to our environment.