If you missed the programme on BBC 2 last Saturday on The Virtual Revolution: Homo Interneticus, you have 3 more days to catch it. It is well worth watching as it shows how the web is changing our brains.
Especially interesting was the comment from a lecturer who said that 10 years ago when he presented a reading list to first year students they didn't bat an eyelid. When he does it now, the response is groans, moans and 'not books'.
Following on from the previous blog, publishers should engage themselves in the struggle for the human brain. They need to champion the physical book and all the benefits that go with it.
Otherwise the market will be dictated indirectly by the web and the grasshopper brains it has evolved in mankind.
You think I am kidding? Look at your kids.
3 comments:
I know, I know, I think the rot set in when they started printing books in English instead of Latin. Actually no, it was when they started writing things down. In my day we new how to use our memories, now it's all "hang on, let me make a note of that" and "I'll have to look it up" and "oh look, the library's closed". Some people nowadays can't recite a single chapter of the Bible without a book in front of them.
Speaking as one who can remember when Susan Greenfield was still a respectable scientist and not a mad old bat supplying hysterical "Facebook gives you cancer" scare stories to the Daily Mail, I've lived long enough to know one thing, and that's this. The stuff our parents had was hopelessly boring and outdated, and the stuff we had when I was growing up was as it should be, but this newfangled stuff is just wrong and unnatural and will result in the destruction of society as we know it. I think I'll call it Greenfield's Law.
;-]
In my day we new how to use our memories
That's probably why I've never got the hang of spelling.
"It is well worth watching as it shows how the web is changing our brains."
Yes, they kept saying that, but they never even attempted to show it. Obviously the Web has changed the way we use our brains, just as any new invention will. Cycling provided a new way of using our legs, but it didn't "change" our legs.
The "science" in this prog (and I use the word much as they do in hair commercials) seemed only to extend to showing that young people, who have grown up with the internet and generally use it more often, are faster at extracting info from it than their elders. Quelle surprise!
They also consistently abused the word "evolution" to mean any old change in society or people's outlook. I confidently await "news" stories about the discovery of a new "internet gene" that makes some people faster at solving online puzzles and means their descendants will take over the world in, oh about five years' time.
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