How many times have you accessed the web in search of something in particular, and after 3 hours left your computer with a bunch of new interesting facts, but not what you actually were supposed to search for?
As human beings and web surfers we tend to let our curiosity guide us in the quest of gaining information, but this quest is frequently frustrated by the amount of knowledge that surrounds us.
Peggy Orenstein in Stop your search engines describes this kind of experience, and gives an extreme solution to the problem by inviting us to try Freedom, which disables networking on macs for up to eight hours at a time. After you've made up your mind to install it on your computer, it works like a A.A detox program making it almost impossible for you to go back online for the time you requested.
The program is having 4,000 downloads a month, which shows that many of us are becoming internet junkies, and need help to let go of the temptation to get back online. The days of constant visits to the library to investigate throughly the most mundane of subjects are long gone, and so is deep knowledge:
"Centuries after his death, brain studies show that true learning is largely an unconscious process. If we’re inundated with data, our brains’ synthesizing functions are overwhelmed by the effort to keep up. And the original purpose — deeper knowledge of a subject — is lost, as surely as the corpses surrounding Sirenum scopuli."
The thought that all the bits of information of multiple ideas we read every day, are preventing us from acquiring deep knowledge from specific ideas is alarming, and yet a fact for the generations that never knew a world without Internet.
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