The 21st century has been a time of change with different types of technologies and innovations. Consequentially our every day life has also evolved. One of those notorious changes has been the way we read and acquire information. Dwight MacDonald in his essay “Reading and Thought” explains how our reading habit are changing due to the fact that we no longer analyze and process what we read in order to create our own opinion. He also mentions the idea of “Functional curiosity” and contradicts it by implying how this curiosity does not help us “function” and instead it makes us believe we do not have the time to engage in deep reading. Lastly he mentions the way magazines are working with this new mentality by printing and writing irrelevant
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With information being so accessible and abundant one might feel like is drowning with so much of it, but is all that information relevant and meaningful to our lives? In the essay “The information Age” Gordon Crovttz reports that “more than half of people think that less than half the information they get … is valuable.” This demonstrates how all this printed and electronic matter are not very pertinent to us. Crovttz also mentions how this has made us “get more sophisticated at separating the important from the unimportant” This skill that we are acquiring from deciding what matter and what does not, is making us passive to everything we read due to the fact that we do not react in an active interested matter. Magazines, books, articles and any other reading matter are all full of shallow information. Most of today magazines are full of celebrities scandals and are made in a way to appeal to our new way of reading: big headlines, short articles and a lot of pictures. That is the reason why this industry makes so much money. Yes people are reading, but how is knowing what is going on with Kim Kardashian helps in our intellectual life. Therefore, the things that we are reading are contributing to our passive mind because we do not have to analyze it or question …show more content…
We have stop questioning texts and challenging their meaning. Like MacDolnald says our minds are “similar [to] people had in past centuries, coarse, shallow, passive, and unoriginal.” For the reason that we are just skimming we do not find the real meaning to what we are reading, we barley get the gist of it. An example of this is the way people read news, normally they only read the headline and maybe the first paragraph that only gives you the basic information totally skipping the important background information of this topic. We all want to be “well informed” and we think we are aware of whats going on due to everything that we “read” but this in a way is making us ignorant. Recently I had a conversation with my co-worker Bryan Alachan and we started talking about news and whats going on around the world. He started to tell me what he had read online, which were mainly headline, at the end I asked him what he thought about all these issues and he was not able to draw his own opinion he was only able to reword what he had just told me. This happens very often where people is not longer able to applied their own views due to the fact that they are not critically reading making them
With information being so accessible and abundant one might feel like is drowning with so much of it, but is all that information relevant and meaningful to our lives? In the essay “The information Age” Gordon Crovttz reports that “more than half of people think that less than half the information they get … is valuable.” This demonstrates how all this printed and electronic matter are not very pertinent to us. Crovttz also mentions how this has made us “get more sophisticated at separating the important from the unimportant” This skill that we are acquiring from deciding what matter and what does not, is making us passive to everything we read due to the fact that we do not react in an active interested matter. Magazines, books, articles and any other reading matter are all full of shallow information. Most of today magazines are full of celebrities scandals and are made in a way to appeal to our new way of reading: big headlines, short articles and a lot of pictures. That is the reason why this industry makes so much money. Yes people are reading, but how is knowing what is going on with Kim Kardashian helps in our intellectual life. Therefore, the things that we are reading are contributing to our passive mind because we do not have to analyze it or question …show more content…
We have stop questioning texts and challenging their meaning. Like MacDolnald says our minds are “similar [to] people had in past centuries, coarse, shallow, passive, and unoriginal.” For the reason that we are just skimming we do not find the real meaning to what we are reading, we barley get the gist of it. An example of this is the way people read news, normally they only read the headline and maybe the first paragraph that only gives you the basic information totally skipping the important background information of this topic. We all want to be “well informed” and we think we are aware of whats going on due to everything that we “read” but this in a way is making us ignorant. Recently I had a conversation with my co-worker Bryan Alachan and we started talking about news and whats going on around the world. He started to tell me what he had read online, which were mainly headline, at the end I asked him what he thought about all these issues and he was not able to draw his own opinion he was only able to reword what he had just told me. This happens very often where people is not longer able to applied their own views due to the fact that they are not critically reading making them