It was the year 2015 and I had just finished re-watching the latest film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic book, The Great Gatsby, when I decided to pick up another book of his titled The Beautiful and the Damned. I was an avid reader of great literary works and found that I enjoyed Fitzgerald’s style of writing; however, after reading a few pages, I placed a bookmark inside, closed it up, and went on to check my Instagram feed. In truth, when I had beheld the countless descriptive paragraphs that the book began with, a part of me had been intimidated. I would not realize until recently just how much my reading habits had worsened to the point of being utterly disinterested in reading an Instagram caption that was more than two sentences long. From then on I would constantly buy new books, which genuinely interested me, and they would remain stationed in my bookshelf looking upon me with a look that said, “We know and we will wait.” How is it that an avid book lover like me could become so disinterested in committing to a book from its front cover to the acknowledgements? As I became more dependent on the Internet for most aspects of my life, the quick-and-easy methods of obtaining information ultimately changed the way I consumed information in its various forms.

The ease with which I expect to find information online has become the cornerstone of my studying and researching methods. It is astounding to think about how quickly one can look up information. In his essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas Carr observes, “Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes” (88). What I once would have visited the library to find can be easily found in the comfort of my home by means of my laptop or phone. Google is one click away and thus, I have the world’s information at my fingertips. This has perhaps deterred my ability to retain vast amounts of information at a given time so much that, even whilst studying for an exam, I would try to condense the material to its bare bones. Sites such as Quizlet have helped me better retain information by formatting it like a flashcard and supplying a quick method for memorization. Researching information for essays mainly consists of typing in the main topic I am interested in and scanning the different headings in hopes that I will find the answers I am looking for. A friend of mine had even shown me how to save a page as a pdf file in order to be able to find the key words that I am interested in—thus eliminating all of the useless paragraphs that I would have been reading otherwise in an attempt to find answers. Perhaps nothing has produced such outcomes—and/or consequences—as the Internet as it pertains to studying habits since the creation of the printing press.

I had once heard someone state something along the lines of millennials having the greatest capacity for multitasking, which I am not sure about, but my own experience lends me to agree in some respect. A few years ago, I could barely fathom listening to music whilst also doing homework; however, I cannot count the amount of times in the last year that I have had a television show playing on my computer whilst also checking my phone and eating a sandwich. There is no use in denying that I was concentrated on all of these things—that I did not forget to chew and did in fact know what Dexter was saying whilst texting my friends back—but I will also admit in not being as fully engrossed in these activities as I could have been were I to do them separately. As Carr urgently points out in his quoting the playwright Richard Foreman, “We risk turning into ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button” (97). Those moments of multitasking become quite simple when one is using an electronic device. Since I had become used to doing multiple things at once, it was all the more difficult to focus on a task that required my full concentration. The difficulty in finishing a full book for me lay in the fact that I could not possibly do anything else and read at the same time and still expect to have fully understood and enjoyed what was happening in those pages. The same went for playing the piano; I could barely sit down long enough to play more than two songs before I became bored and found something else to do. I had begun to think that our generation would eventually develop a way to transcend these problems and to be able to achieve an unparalleled level of multitasking without sacrificing our concentration. Seeing as how this will probably not happen anytime in the near future, we must find ways so return our attention to singular tasks such as reading books.

At the beginning of this month I picked up my copy of The Beautiful and the Damned and have now finished the entire book. This is nothing compared to how back in the day I used to finish a book in two days; however, it is a step towards the right direction. Every time I picked up the book, I would turn off the ringer of my phone, put it down, and read until I felt the urge to move onto something else, an urge I would fight by relaxing my body, taking a few deep breaths, and continuing on with my reading. It seems as bit too simple, but this was the most effective method for me. By being present in the moment, you are able to concentrate on one task more easily than when you are jittery and itching for the next thing. “In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book,” Carr contemplates, “we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas (97).” As I train myself to fully commit to one task, I develop a more peaceful state of mind. By the end of the year I might be ready to bust out my copy of Anna Karenina.