Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy.  Really interesting isn’t it!

Nowadays we are too plugged into internet and our mind is going in a million different directions all the time.  For nearly two years I have been spending a lot of time online.  Though it has opened up more quality time of life for me, nowadays I am missing my books, favorite movies and my outings as earlier.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethics remains obscure.  

While going through Atlantic monthly of July/August I came across an interesting article written by Nicholas Carr titled as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It’s a wonderful article and I thought to discuss about some salient features.  

Carr says in the beginning “I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing me in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread and begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”.  

Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.  “The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.” 

Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive Neuroscientist at Yale. 

Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.  

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.  

The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we viewthe more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect informationabout us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercialInternet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind aswe flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing thesecompanies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought.It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.  

“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.” Zachary Sims, the Old Greenwich, Conn., teenager, often stays awake until 2 or 3 in the morning reading articles about technology or politics — his current passions — on up to 100 Web sites. “On the Internet, you can hear from a bunch of people,” said Zachary “They may not be pedigreed academics. They may be someone in their shed with a conspiracy theory. But you would weigh that.” Though he also likes to read books (earlier this year he finished, and loved, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand), Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”  

Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.” 

The Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.  

To summarize what Nicholas Carr Warns that, the Web is changing the way we think, by underlining the fact that “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away our capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he also adds by confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.  

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet is different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.  The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards. It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most. “Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.” 

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who foundedGoogle while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speakfrequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, aHAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimatesearch engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech afew years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificialintelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you hadall the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain thatwas smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a conventionof scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”  

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. What we are losing by this is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading.