The Effect of the Internet on Reading

“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Nicholas Carr

While preparing for this fall semester, I came across the citation for an article from The Atlantic.  In mid-2008, writer Nicholas Carr asked, “Is Google making us stupid?”

Carr, a writer and former deep reader, noticed that after a decade of using the internet, he cannot engage with reading like he used to. “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. . . . The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” His article suggested that the way the internet works not only changes what we read, but how we read, and perhaps even changes the very way we think.

I’ve addressed the internet’s effect on our lives before, but here I want to address what the internet has done to our ability to read and to engage deeply with text. What Carr says about reading is, I notice, true. After spending more than a decade with volumes of information at my fingertips and with the ability to, in seconds, move from one bit of information to another to yet another, it’s much harder now to engage deeply with any single text.

For me, if I have to scroll down two or three or—gasp!—four times to completely read an article online, well, I’m going to be hard-pressed to do it in a single, uninterrupted session. I’m off, after that first screen’s worth of text, to see what’s trending on msn.com, to peek at the headlines on cnn.com, to check my email again, to maybe order that shirt that I like (that I’ve looked at online five times already).  And this is a process I’m likely to repeat not 15 minutes later while trying to read the second or third screen’s worth of text, even though it’s likely that nothing has changed since I last checked those same sites. I’ve come to expect (and maybe at some level, require) my information in convenient bite-sized chunks; in this way, perhaps, I feel I can manage all the information that I will receive during the course of the day. If there’s something long that I must read—or really want to read—I’ll often print it out and save it for a later time, usually when I’ve removed myself from the computer, and even then, I’m still distracted.

Like Carr, I don’t think my experience is unusual. In fact, people’s lack of capacity for deep reading is probably more prevalent today than it was in 2008, when Carr published his article.

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Welcome ALWD

Marquette Law School is pleased to host the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) 2013 Biennial Conference from June 26-28. The conference is titled “Doing It Our Way”: Learning from Our Programmatic Differences and Similarities. Approximately 170 faculty representing 99 schools are attending. Just before the conference is an Innovative Teaching Workshop, and after the conference the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) is hosting a writers’ workshop in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

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Studying Law Without the Socratic Method

One of the things I noticed during my semester as an exchange student at the University of Copenhagen is how much legal education in Europe differs from the approach taken by law schools in the United States. The most drastic difference is, without a doubt, the way in which classes are conducted. In U.S. law schools, most professors use the Socratic method and the call system that law students have come to fear. In contrast, in many continental European law schools, courses are taught simply through lectures. On rare occasions a student will interject with a comment or a question, and on other rare occasions a professor will ask for voluntary input from the class, but for the most part, the professor is the only one who speaks. I have sometimes wondered whether a non-Socratic method of teaching adequately prepares students to be effective lawyers. American law students are forced to take a position on the law, make arguments for it, and apply it to the facts. By being subjected to the Socratic method, we are forced to think on our feet and be prepared for any questions that may be thrown at us by a judge, a client, or a fellow attorney. Arguing a position is one of the most important lawyering skills in both litigation and transactional practices. Therefore, teaching these skills would seem to be a valuable part of legal education anywhere in the world.

Given this apparent superiority of Socratic legal education, I have often wondered whether European law students feel they are at somewhat of a disadvantage. After all, they are not being challenged in class on a daily basis to make arguments and defend positions. I was surprised to learn that many European law students do not believe they are left behind in this respect. Many European students I have met say that classes are meant simply to teach about the law. If students wish to develop their litigation skills, they take a litigation class or join a moot court team, but there is generally no cross-over between developing one’s ability to argue and learning about the law. That is, up until the final exam. Interestingly, many law courses here in Copenhagen administer an oral final, where the professor challenges each student’s ability to argue about the law. Effectively, such an exam tests the students’ skills in taking a position on an issue and defending it. The way European law students view it is that they spend the semester learning about the law, and they then argue the law in the exams. Generally, they seem to feel this provides enough practice of argumentative skills.

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