A Case for Mindful Browsing | Peer to Peer Review
Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN
Jul 8, 2010Are my information habits making me twitchy?
I haven't read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows yet, and probably won't—I'm shallow that way—but it's hard to escape commentaries on his thesis that the Internet is rewiring our brains and making it harder to focus on complex ideas. Some think our state of constant distractibility is a serious problem; others believe there are positive tradeoffs in being a well-networked dilettante.
Though I suspect Carr's 15 minutes of fame is about to give way to another neuroscience story (Brain science meets The Killer Inside Me? Hot dog!), the notion that the web is too much with us, that we're too busy multitasking to think clearly, that our foot is jammed on the accelerator is both pervasive and persuasive.
I was thinking about this when my laptop abruptly decided to retire. As I installed software and tweaked settings on a new one, I took a look at how I manage the flow of news and conversations that I scan daily. Though I will never be as up-to-date as Steven Bell, the King of Keeping Up, I spend a fair amount of time each day seeing what's going on using a mix of old-fashioned email discussion lists, news digests, social networks, and blogs.
In order to avoid RSS overload, I had been keeping my blog and news feeds on a Firefox toolbar rather than in a feed reader. My rule was that when the toolbar was full, I had to delete a feed to add a new one. I got very good at shortening the names of the blogs I was following to squeeze in as many as possible. The downside was that I didn't have access to that particular group of feeds anywhere but on my laptop, a limitation that became all too clear when that laptop stopped speaking to me. Now I'm using Google Reader to see if I can manage my compulsive news habit without overdosing.
The serendipity factor
While deciding which feeds to subscribe to, it occurred to me that RSS feeds are to search engines as browsing the stacks is to catalogs. Browsing, which seems haphazard and random, is really a systematic way of discovering things you didn't know existed. It's a method of engaging in what Catherine Sheldrick Ross calls "information encountering." Tom Mann, the author of the Oxford Guide to Library Research, thinks browsing is underrated and advises putting yourself in a place where information might be "so you can recognize valuable things when you see them."
That effect is what I'm trying to create when I add an RSS subscription; I'm hoping that it will keep my curiosity stoked. So, why does it feel so completely different than browsing books?
When I browse in the stacks, time seems to slow down. I can pull books off the shelf at random and scan introductions and tables of contents without feeling the pressure to be productive. When I do pull a book off the shelf, it doesn't feel as if the other books are clamoring for my attention: pick me! No, pick me! I'm surrounded by more information than I will ever have time to process, and yet that abundance doesn't make me feel anxious or overwhelmed. Browsing in the stacks is oddly soothing.
The violent footnote
In contrast, when I skim pages online, I'm always feeling a tug from the periphery, as if I should be looking at something else more interesting, more important, just out of my line of sight. The clock is ticking, new emails are flooding my inbox, and I can't quite settle down. I feel guilty when I take a break to see what's happening with my FriendFeed buddies (holy smokes, what's going on at ScienceBlogs?); while there, I notice an email pop up that I really should deal with, but while I think about how to word my response I somehow let my fingers wander to BoingBoing or Metafilter.
Is it hyperlinks that make me hyper? Nicholas Carr has argued that "delinkifying" a text makes it easier to focus:
Even if you don't click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it's there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.
He points out that links act like footnotes—but "a more violent form of footnote" because it yanks you out of one text and into another. (I'm not sure about that. I am prone to flipping to the footnotes when reading an article that isn't giving me quite what I want; it's actually more distracting than a link, because I have to do more to track down the source and evaluate whether I should pursue it.) But as Jason Fry at Nieman Journalism Lab points out, sources are key to credibility; having the original text handy gives readers the opportunity to confirm sources for themselves. I can't really blame the links or footnotes, because they serve a purpose and aid discovery.
Better living through browsing
Given that the students I teach generally don't think of browsing in the stacks as a useful strategy, I suspect that somewhere along the line, I convinced myself that browsing among books was an acceptable way to spend time, but I haven't yet given myself permission to dawdle online in the same purposefully undirected way. This makes me wonder about how, as professionals and academics, we routinely enrich our intellectual lives by putting ourselves in places where ideas we aren't actively seeking can find us—a knack we don't teach.
The Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, which have shaped many academic libraries' instruction programs, are curiously biased toward information seeking. In fact, the first thing you can do if you are information literate is to be able to define what information you need.
That task-based orientation dominates how our students use libraries. I have to persuade them that browsing is not a waste of time, that what they thought they were looking for is likely to mutate into something very different as they learn more about their topic, and that they should slow down and actually look at what they're finding so it can guide their next steps. For many students, research is remix. It's the opposite of creative or exploratory. They go to the library on an errand to pick up some quotes. This is a misunderstanding that can't be blamed on the Internet, because it predates it.
I'm looking forward to a report coming from Project Information Literacy any day now, a study of assignment prompts. I hope it will help me work with faculty to design assignments that help students focus more on engagement than efficiency, on the encounter, not the hunt. And maybe it will also help me figure out how to organize my information encounters so that I am not always—oh look, a butterfly!
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), has just been published by Minotaur Books.
