Yes it’s true, the internet is evil yet I have a love hate relationship with it. I recently discovered this article and it basically sums up my dilemma with these here tubes.

While the internet is such a great resource it has fundamentally changed the way that I approach reading. Where I used to read and concentrate on what I was reading for hours at a time, now I find myself self easily distracted and constantly skimming. Sometimes, I would enjoy reading something powerful or interesting and then deeply contemplating what I was reading while making sophisticated connections and taking notes.

Now, the shameful truth is, I don’t even read books anymore! Hell, I didn’t even read the whole article I linked to above! I saw it was paginated and I gave up after I read the first page out of five. But since I was interested in the article I bookmarked it to del.icio.us under the tag ‘read this.’ Go ahead and check out my delicious ‘readthis’ tag and see how many articles I have bookmarked there. It’s pretty obvious I won’t EVER be reading them. It’s just an exercise to relieve my guilt.

I once listened to a lecture by a professor whose forte was writing about technology and society. He said that he chooses not to use computers and won’t even appear on television. Regarding computer use, he said something interesting that I didn’t understand at the time. The reason he didn’t use a computer is because it teaches to think of everything as data and that this has a detrimental effect on the mind. Now I understand.

You can even see bloggers adapting to the habits of their readers. Bloggers recommend writing “scannable content” or content that is essentially designed to be skimmed. Others have done research on the eye movements of people browsing content on the internet and created heatmaps to describe users reading patterns. These take the shape of an ‘f’ on the page. People scan the first and second lines then go down the page and off they go to another site.

While I won’t be quitting the internet anytime soon I must say that the thought has crossed my mind. It should be noted that as cool as this internet thing is, it comes with a price and that price might be more than you wish to pay.