Are we ready?

From the morning when I open my eyes, it is become a habit that I turn my computer on, log on my MSN, Skype...and grab some bread with some hot chocolate milk in my mouth, click the news window to check the latest report about so-called "major event" but cannot get the main idea after half an hour, while still continue gossip with my friends on QQ, that can be a day for me.


However, when I loaded with assignments from different professors, thing begin to change, I can finished browsing numerous websites very fast and quickly nailed down to the essential perspective then come up with some my own thoughts, even sometimes I post some ideas online which according to my friends is very useful to them, that also used to be a day for me.

Then come with the concept "cognitive surplus" that Clay Shirky defined, it described a tremendous power which come from the spare time like the time people were couch potatoes, by using the trillion time people spend on tv into the internet field people can build a better and more cooperate world, because we can create more humane internet environment which will help us save time in the long future.

But here comes the problem, just like the example I give at the beginning , Same person ends with different days, either to be squandering or effective, the huge difference lies in the vacant brain and critical thinking, Shirky's " cognitive surplus" is definitely a brilliant idea, it brought the "invisible time" of a human being's into our sight, however, the perspective of "cognitive surplus" was too idealistic, for each person cannot take all the time in a tensed state, such critical thinking is impossible to maintain in our whole spare time.

Then it reminds me of the article of "Are they ready to work?” In that report, it reveal a problem that now for most of American high school or college school students, most of them are lack in the ability to think more critical, cause the dilemma that they are hard to find a decent job. Without the capability to think critically, we are just tend to spend the time on internet to do some meaningless work, let alone creating some original works.

And having the ability to think critical does not equal to think critical all the time, for some people, getting the access to Internet means they have time to relax themselves, without the pressure, more often than not they like to indulge themselves to a illusionary world, and people are "Creature of habit" when they feel comfortable for the situation, they are likely to lose the ability to think critical.T herefore, the situation which Carr described happened, even though internet developed our certain skills, it killing the ablity for deep thinking, thus come along with cursory reading, distracted think and superficial learning. So even we can have tremendous spare time, people are not necessarily to take full use of that.