The amount of reading we do
“Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much month’s efforts could be produced on call.” - Vannevar Bush “As We May Think”
This passage got me thinking about the amount of reading we are assigned in our classes. Now this is just an opinion, but sometimes I feel as though my collective classes assign so much reading that I do not have the time to process the information. I would much rather have less readings assigned, time to ponder them, be assigned an analytical response and discussion on the readings. Maybe this is just something that I have to get used to as a university student, but I’m not certain that this is the best possible method for training young minds to think and formulate actions to create change.
Maybe there is something that the technological arts can do to create some better way for information exchange.
I know this isn’t locative, but I wanted to add that Google Reader is a really cool tool for managing all of your RSS subscriptions. It basically manages all of the blogs and newspapers around the world on topics or subjects that you want to read about. It keeps me pretty much busy reading when I have any spare time…
Comment by dstrand — March 18, 2008 @ 8:48 am
Sometimes it becomes overwhelming to do the amount of readings assigned in college course plus keep up with other daily information. I would like to see some type of technological advances that would give us time to process what we have learned for the day.
Comment by dpena — March 18, 2008 @ 8:18 pm
I find this problem gets even more exaggerated in Literature Classes, where reading is all the more central. We have to read an entire book for class, talk about it for an hour, and then move on to the next one. There’s no way we can ever take in the complexities of the story that the authors put into their work.
Vannevar Bush talked about the need for a machine that could be used like an external brain to hold information until until we needed it, and would allow us to exchange information readily. Now days we have our computers to store and exchange information, and this became our Information Age. But we are still unable to process it all. Contrary to helping, the free exchange of information via the technology of the internet only creates more stuff to process.
I suppose the way history has attempted to remedy information processing overload is to process a text, and then write down that analysis so that other people “don’t have to” process the same information. Analytical essays, editorials, and blogs are born. But ironically I suspect that this solution only creates more information that we will need to process (Are we now going to want to read “As We May Think” to find out more?). I don’t know about how people felt in the past, but especially true of now days in America, the more we are fed pre-digested analyses the more we are socially compelled to “think for ourselves” and possibly reject what others tell us anyway.
Maybe its like how we only use 10% of our brains. With so much information in the world, maybe the only way to avoid overload is to concede that we won’t learn it all. I’m sure I can only make it through literature courses by simply not doing most of the reading.
Comment by aBuerer — March 31, 2008 @ 4:04 pm