OT: Movie trailer "Out of Print" on the move from print to digital books

Josh said:

Thanks to the internet and digital information, an unbelievable amount of knowledge is literally a few mouse clicks away. Never has this been possible in all of history. Yet, this ability is somehow making our culture "dumber".

Yes, we know how to find reams of information online now, but information is not the same as knowledge, and knowledge is not the same as wisdom.

Dan Francis said:

Not only that 100 years from now at present pace maybe sooner, our accumulated knowledge will be destroyed because of some EMP or something. Stone lasts thousands of years, paper centuries media.. well hard to say but definitely more liability to being lost.

When I was a kid, my mother used to impress upon me the importance of memorizing Scripture because someday our bibles might be taken away from us like what happened to Corrie ten Boom and her sister. They knew a lot of Scripture and it helped sustain them in the Nazi prison.

Nowadays, because so much information is available at our fingertips online, our memories don't get exercised as much. We figure we can always look something up if we need to know it again, including Bible passages. I find my own memory faltering at an alarming rate and I'm not that old yet.

Googling for information is definitely not the same as reading and learning it. I'm not saying reading/learning can't take place online, but our habits of reading have definitely changed over the decades. Now it's more likely to be jumping around from here to there, with hyperlinked books. The ability to read and pay attention to long pieces of literature or to follow a sustained argument is not taught as much anymore in our schools. And many people don't even understand that meaning of "argument" anymore (defense of a thesis statement); they think argument only means contentiousness.

I remember when I first saw the article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in The Atlantic magazine. It talked about this tendency to not be able to read long pieces of writing anymore without jumping around. I found myself in agreement with it, particularly since I noticed I was reading it by jumping through it reading only the first sentence of each paragraph! My own practice of scatterbrained reading demonstrated that Nicholas Carr was onto something! I have since gone back and read the whole thing, and also read his complete book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Good points to ponder. I don't agree with all of it. I do think it is possible to train our brains to still do the more sustained or meditative kinds of reading in spite of all the online jumping and skipping that we do. But it's not easy.