Paper…For the Win

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.