Skimming versus Thinking

I have meant to start writing this blog for some time now. However, I never seem to have enough time to sit down and think through my thoughts and write them out. I have been asking myself how it could be that I find myself in a world where I have access to so much information, yet I don’t seem to have the time to actually sit down and analyze the information that has come my way. My good friend recently sent me a piece from the Atlantic that captures the root cause of my inability to slow down and reflect enough to write. The piece by Nicholas Carr sheds light into a generation that has moved away from deep reading to skimming. A generation that has come of age with the search engine and hyperlinks, that chooses to fly through skimming bits of information without stopping long enough to truly absorb the information that has come their way. The article points out that we are becoming like pancakes, spread wide and thin, but lacking the depth that comes with great analysis of the information we consume. The valley has become a poster child for this sort of information consumption. Personally, between the many blogs I subscribe to, the amount of emails that come my way, the number of messages on my SNSs that need responses, and the work I do in building startups, I find little time to stop and reflect.

The article asks a very good question, Is Google Making us Stupid? The simple answer is of course not, but I have to agree with the article that the way our brains think is certainly changing. In the few minutes that I have spent writing this blog post, I have also refreshed my SNSs, read my feeds, and read/answered a couple of emails. In a world of information abundance, our brains are being programmed to skim information and make connections with other pieces of information versus thinking deeply and abstractly about one thing. We are becoming a generation of system thinkers that see connections between things and pieces of information, versus deep analyzers of specific problems. The challenge we face is how to stop our addiction for more information, and instead think more thoroughly about one problem.

Economically, search engines want us to click through as many pages as possible to maximize page views and ad impressions. However, the question to ask is whether there is a better way for our brains to consume this vast amount of information. Can the information be presented in a way that makes us think versus click and skim. That is, can a new host of startups evolve the internet to once again reshape our brains into thinkers versus skimmers?

This blog will represent my white space, where I will stop in weekly to take time away from clicking and skimming to think through all the information I absorbed via meetings, blogs, conversations, etc. over the previous week and to share my perspective on some of those subjects.