Is it Me or is it the Media?

As I was reading the article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr for class the other day, I found myself sadly relating to his words.

 I, too, find my brain and the way I think to be changing. I use to love reading books for fun, diving into detailed imagery, placing myself into the scenes I was reading, and understanding the words that I chose to drown myself with. It was relaxing and exciting to me. Now, it is hard for me to pick up a book and read 10 pages at a time or even to begin reading at all. I have noticed that as I get older, I am less patient and more easily distracted, but after reading this article it makes me wonder-- is it just me or has the media helped shape me in this way?

It really is a struggle, and a sad struggle at that. I have trained my mind to skim through pages and pages of information in order to find what best fits the purpose of me even reading the text to begin with. The last book I read for leisure, I remember having to keep refocusing my mind and training my eyes to read one line at a time as they always wanted to keep reading ahead before my mind could process what words I had already read. I was reading for fun, yet my mind did not understand that anymore, and instead kept resorting to the skimming process as if I was in a rush to finish. This "retraining" in itself exhausted me. 
I can spend hours reading an article that was assigned to me for homework, take notes on the article, and when it came time to discuss it in class, have no recollection of what I read or wrote about at all. It has all become sort of "going through the motions" to me and I do not like it. I have never been that type of person. If I am doing something, I want to be fully engaged and perform at my best. Now, I see this "going through the motion" feeling to be a very challenging concept to accept and change in my life. We live in a fast-paced, time-focused society these days and it is making life pass by in the blink of an eye and here we are spending little time enjoying it. 
Although it is easy to have access to anything we want to know, I believe it is still important to learn and to live life. I miss my young mind, the mind that was eager to learn new things, read every single word in a 500 paged book, read the next book of the series, and the next and the next. I miss the me that use to spend time understanding concepts I did not understand and work at perfecting things I struggled with. And this is something I struggle with: having the new me overtake the factors I loved about myself while I was younger. And this is something that I am going to work on. It is time for me to retrain my mind to think like a child again and stop going through the motions. It is time to live life and live it with a purpose.