In trying to think of a relevant issue my student readers would enjoy, I realized scoping current events for something I could form an opinion about just wasn’t cutting it. Instead, I chose to look to the expert —myself and my peers. We’re the experts. We know what is relevant to students because we are the students. Not that this is a normal occurrence in our apartment, but last night my roommates and I engaged in a conversation that was extremely relevant and inspired this column today.
We started discussing the difficulties of getting back into the school year, specifically the challenges that come with being bombarded with hundreds of pages of text a week. And this text isn’t easy. This text is challenging, in-depth and requires extreme concentration, especially if you are a political science major like myself. In trying to figure out a game plan for the hundreds of pages I needed to read for this week, I began coming up with alternatives to deep reading because, let’s face it, actually reading all the material seems simply impossible.
Plan A: Well, obviously Spark Notes was an option that entered my mind. B: Pay attention in class, take excellent notes and hope that it all works out. What a risky little game. C. SKIM. As I pondered the best of these silly options, it finally hit me. I am cheating myself out of my education. I am cheating myself out of my thousands of dollars that are going into this education. I’m only cheating myself; not my professor, not my TA, certainly not the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s easy to look at it as, “OK, if I can just get an A in this class by using Spark Notes, it will be fine.” And maybe it’s true that we simply don’t have time to read all that text; for instance, I am sitting outside of a Starbucks writing this article on my break rather than reading what I need to read for class. But this is important, and I want my fellow students to hear my point of view.
I’m worried for future students, and I am worried for myself. I plan on going to law school, and I am sure plenty of you are planning on attending some sort of graduate or professional school yourselves. This is not a new problem that is being addressed, but it certainly hasn’t been addressed enough. This problem is what our instantaneous text, aka the Internet, our laptops, our tablets, our cell phones, our Snap Chat, our instant news is doing to our ability to read long, complex, important text. It is also affecting the field of journalism itself.
Journalism seems to be adapting itself to the changing ways of taking in information with Twitter and shorter content tailored to people who “don’t have time to sit down and read a whole article.” In fact, I will be pleasantly surprised if you can read this entire column of mine. It’s terrifying. I used to love to read. Now I find that even reading a book for fun takes immense amounts of effort. Why get deeply engrossed in a book when I can have instantaneous knowledge sent to my brain from the Internet, from snippets of news, magazine articles and the like? Well I can tell you about a million reasons to still get engrossed in a book, but my subconscious apparently can’t.
The ever more terrifying thing is that my friends are experiencing the increasing difficulty of reading as well, and that this could be biologically altering our brains and the way that we process knowledge and information. Humans are evolving creatures, and I worry that down the road we’ll be nothing but an extremely impatient species who loses the ability to spend a substantial amount of time thinking about something critically. We will be like machines where speed is the top priority.
The Internet has been a tremendous step for us for many reasons, but its effects on our brains are quite troubling. The way we are changing, specifically the way our education is changing is alarming. I don’t like that I can’t sit down and read a difficult text without getting distracted by other things I have to do— my cell phone or Facebook. This isn’t just bad during college when we have hundreds of pages of difficult text to read, but this is bad for when we are in graduate school or in our career as well. In law school, I know that it is required to read very difficult text, to think of the legal concepts and to spend a considerable amount of time doing so. With how I am being trained to read now, I worry about my success in law school. For any job that requires a lot of reading and writing, this evolution of the way we think is worrisome.
Maybe some of you aren’t experiencing that issue and if you aren’t, I am envious; however, I know many who are experiencing this issue, and I hope people realize how this will impact them, the way it will affect the way they consume knowledge and information. A couple of my TAs this semester have required that their students do not use laptops to take notes, but must come to class with a notebook filled with notes from that week’s text. I will admit that I was annoyed at first, but when I began to read the material prior to class and take notes on it in a notebook, pen to paper, I found myself much more engaged in the text and able to form arguments in my head and critically think. I urge you to look at the way that you take in knowledge, how it might be affecting your education, and if it really is the best way for you to do things, even if it may not be as convenient as Spark Notes or a Google search.
Haleigh is a senior majoring in political science. Did you make it to the end of this column and agree with her? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
