In the battle between paper books, magazines, actual
newspapers, and all things e, many people wrote off paper ages ago. It's just
so much easier to download a book or magazine onto the device of your choice,
or find news or whatever else you might be looking for online. We've gotten so
used to having instant access to the internet in our pockets we take for
granted that anything we want to know is at our fingertips. And it's true that
we have massive amounts of information a tap or click away. But what happens
when we find the information we we're looking for? Here's where it gets
interesting.
The very nature of being online turns us into multi-taskers.
Click on this link now, or finish the article, or at least the paragraph first?
The sentence? Oh, here's a new email, a Facebook notification, a new text, and
a pop-up ad. In The Shallows: What theInternet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr likens being on the internet
to trying to read a book while doing a crossword puzzle. Lab studies have
proven that the internet makes us stupid, at least temporarily. Problem solving
(searching, navigating, finding that info) plus divided attention (ooh, what's
that?) equals cognitive overload. And cognitive overload kills comprehension.
So what to do when comprehension (rather than info
gathering) is the goal? Enter our old friend, paper, whose super power is
comprehension. Reading a book or magazine is a single activity, free from
distractions. It's just you and the words on the page. But where paper really
scores over the digital world is in note-taking. If you take notes on a laptop
in class, can you type faster than you can write those same notes longhand? For
most of us, the answer is yes. But as this nifty infographic from the National
Pen Company illustrates, handwriting leads to better recall because it creates
a spatial relation between each bit of info we jot down, it allows us to think
more deeply about what we're writing, and because it's more difficult to take
notes verbatim, we have to process the information we're hearing in real time
and summarize it in a way that makes sense to us.
The massive amount of information available online will
continue to grow, and all things digital will continue to become enmeshed in
everyday life. But, in the cosmic game of rock, paper, scissors, don't rule out
paper just yet.
