Dreaming in Digital
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 Perhaps I am showing my age, I grew up and until my junior year of high school, pre-internet. Google wasn’t even popular until long after I graduated high school. The web seems to attract a lot of blame for the problem of attention and the difficulty with close reading. Distraction has always been a problem, before the internet, it was television, before that it was radio, and before that… I don’t know, but I’m sure they had a scapegoat ready to go. I admit that reading on the web can be distracting and those distractions are worse now than in the past. However, distractions have always been the problem for close reading and discipline. Because we live in a time where distractions are at an all-time high doesn’t mean should give up close reading and move to something else like hyperreading or surface reading is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 With powerful digital tools at out disposal, methods other than close reading can be viable. Close reading has become just another tool in the digital humanist’s arsenal. For example, digital tools might provide insights into very large bodies of work, or comparisons of disparate works that might have been impossible when close reading was the primary tool in the humanist’s arsenal.
I am totally showing my age when I say that I never grew up without Google. Crazy.
But it is true that before the internet, there was always something else that caught our attention, distracted us and then later returned to it for a resource.
I agree that just because we have moved on to become a more digitally advanced and focused world, doesn’t mean that we have to give up everything we learned before the internet came about.
Also I like the baby out of bathwater analogy.
This reads like a somewhat glib response, and I’m not sure what it has to do with Hayles’ arguments in this essay. Hayles, after all, isn’t treating “distraction” in the same way Carr is; that is to say, she isn’t simply demonizing it. Rather, she’s trying to point towards a “middle path” that would have us become better digital readers and have us remain good readers of traditional, print-based materials. “Attention” figures into this argument, of course, but not in the ways you describe here.