Has the internet made us stupid, a recent article in the Atlantic asks. The author, blogger Nicolas Carr, frets about the effect the internet has had on his thinking processes, on the way it has rewired his brains’ very circuitry.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. 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. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon.

I have the same problem and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I haven’t read a book in its entirety in ages, even though I keep buying them. I have piles of books at my bedside table which, when I got them, I knew I would devour in one reading. Months, even years after, I haven’t gone beyond a few chapters, at best. I stop and start and finally give up at some point, distracted by the flickering text and images on my monitor. Read the rest of this entry »

Manolo Quezon wrote in his column (Bringing the World to Our Shores, Inquirer, 06 July 2007) about his plans to take up graduate studies, specifically an MBA, in an international program offered by an Australian university. His reason for doing so is to keep up and deal with the complexities brought about by an increasingly borderless world, in the context of his vocation as a political commentator.

As bigger and bigger chunks of our population become less insular and more comfortable with the complexities of the modern world, I have a hunch that people like me, who have the task of commenting on national affairs, will find it increasingly hard-going unless we make an effort to understand these complexities. These complexities, on the whole, have to do with economics and finance as disciplines, and business as an activity: and how all three have been used to discourage citizens from being politically engaged.

I confess to sharing his concern, a sort of low-level anxiety, a vague fear that my knowledge and present skills level may not enable me to understand and cope with the speed of globalization and change. It seems there’s nothing unusual in this, as I found out in a piece written by David Brooks of the New York Times. Read the rest of this entry »

The lone suspect in the gruesome and senseless murder of Peace Corps volunteer Julia Campbell has been found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment by the Regional Trial Court of Banaue, Ifugao province.

In a 36-page decision, Judge Ester Piscoso-Flor found the accused Juan Donald Duntugan, 25, guilty of murdering Campbell in Batad village, near the Ifugao rice terraces where the victim was hiking, on April 8, 2007, “with the use of treachery and abuse of superior strength”.

It appears that the convicted murderer killed Ms. Campbell without any clear motive or reason. Read the rest of this entry »

Updates

That is the question.

ABS-CBN’s official position is that it is not paying any ransom for its news team, led by television reporter Ces Drilon, which was kidnapped in Sulu together with MSU professor and peace advocate Octavio Dinampo. The network said in a statement:

ABS-CBN News journalists Ces Drilon, Jimmy Encarnacion, and Angelo Valderama have been kidnapped for ransom.

ABS-CBN News is doing everything it can to help the families of its kidnapped journalists through this harrowing ordeal.

However, ABS-CBN News will abide by its policy not to pay ransom because this would embolden kidnap for ransom groups to abduct other journalists, putting more lives at risk.

However, Chief Superintendent Joel Goltiao, police director for the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), confirmed that negotiations had begun with the abductors, and that there is a “great possibility” that the journalists would be freed, but he “cannot give an exact date”. He added that although the official policy is not to pay the kidnappers, discussions on ransom can’t be helped (“hindi waiwasan”). Reports say the Abu Sayyaf kidnappers are asking for P10 million to P30 million. Read the rest of this entry »

I had some reservations about writing on the deaths of ten individuals, murder victims who were killed in a successful robbery of the Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) branch in Cabuyao, Laguna a week ago. The killings hit close to home and I felt I would not be objective enough to handle the subject.

But having already made a post on it some days ago, and seeing the response of so many readers, I feel compelled to close the loop on my analysis of the tragic incident and its aftermath.

The brutal inhumanity of the killings have been reported extensively in traditional media and the blogsphere , and there’s no need to repeat the details here. However, recent events related to the incident require closer examination.

First, the handling by the police of the investigation. In their usual ham-fisted way, the initial responding team broke into the RCBC Cabuyao, Laguna branch, and started trampling around the scene of the crime. Understandable, as there was the urgency of saving any survivors. But was there a systematic attempt to gather and preserve evidence critical to the investigation ? I don’t know. But it appears, from news reports and pictures of the incident which have been circulating on the internet, that even the police were taken aback by the mayhem and violence of the killings. I hope the Philippine National Police (PNP) Scene of the Crime Operations (SOCO) people were cool and level-headed enough to have collected, in a scientific and methodical way, all the possible physical evidence which could lead to the killers. There were certainly plenty of pictures taken, some of which found its way online, but more on this later. Read the rest of this entry »