Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, D

Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, 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.


I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.


I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Kết quả (Việt) 1:

Dave, dừng lại. Dừng lại, bạn sẽ? Thôi đi, Dave. Sẽ ngăn chặn, Dave?" Do đó, các siêu máy tính HAL kêu gọi với các phi hành gia không đội trời chung Dave Bowman trong một cảnh nổi tiếng và weirdly cay hướng tới sự kết thúc của Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, gần như được gửi đến một không gian sâu chết do trục trặc máy, là một cách bình tĩnh, coldly ngắt kết nối các mạch nhớ kiểm soát nhân tạo "bộ não". Dave, tâm trí của tôi là có"HAL nói, forlornly. "Tôi có thể cảm thấy nó. Tôi có thể cảm thấy nó."Tôi có thể cảm thấy nó, quá. Trong vài năm qua tôi đã có một cảm giác khó chịu rằng ai đó hoặc một cái gì đó, đã tinkering với bộ não của tôi, remapping các mạch thần kinh, reprogramming bộ nhớ. Tâm trí của tôi không phải là đi-đến nay như tôi có thể nói- nhưng nó là thay đổi. Tôi không nghĩ cách tôi sử dụng để suy nghĩ. Tôi có thể cảm thấy nó đặt mạnh mẽ khi tôi đọc. Hoà nhập mình trong một cuốn sách hoặc một bài báo dài được sử dụng để được dễ dàng. Tâm trí của tôi sẽ nhận được caught trong các câu chuyện hoặc các lần lượt của các đối số, và tôi sẽ chi tiêu giờ dạo qua các trải dài dài của văn xuôi. Đó là hiếm khi các trường hợp nữa. Bây giờ tập trung của tôi thường xuyên bắt đầu trôi dạt sau hai hoặc 3 trang. Tôi có lo ngại mất thread, bắt đầu tìm kiếm cái gì khác để làm. Tôi cảm thấy như tôi luôn luôn kéo não ương ngạnh của tôi quay lại văn bản. Đọc sâu được sử dụng để đến tự nhiên đã trở thành một cuộc đấu tranh.Tôi nghĩ rằng tôi biết những gì đang xảy ra. Trong hơn một thập kỷ bây giờ, tôi đã chi tiêu rất nhiều thời gian trực tuyến, tìm kiếm và lướt sóng và đôi khi thêm vào cơ sở dữ liệu lớn của Internet. Các trang Web đã là một ơn trời cho tôi như là một nhà văn. Nghiên cứu phải cần ngày trong các ngăn xếp hoặc định kỳ phòng thư viện có thể được thực hiện trong vài phút. Một vài các tìm kiếm của Google, một số nhanh chóng nhấp vào siêu liên kết, và tôi đã có người hay mét thực tế hoặc pithy báo tôi đã sau. Ngay cả khi tôi không làm việc, tôi có thể không foraging ở các trang Web thông tin-thickets'reading và viết email, quét tiêu đề và bài viết blog, xem video và nghe podcast hoặc chỉ tripping liên kết liên kết. (Không giống như ghi chú, mà chúng ta đôi khi so sánh, siêu liên kết không chỉ là điểm đến liên quan đến công trình; họ đẩy bạn về hướng họ.)For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”