Printed Matter That Inundates Society Daily and the Connection It Has with Reading and Thought

In the article written by Dwight MacDonald, “Reading and Thought,” MacDonald disagrees with Henry Luce idea of functional curiosity. Luce invented the term “ functional curiosity,” meaning “kind of searching, hungry interest in what is happening everywhere” (248). MacDonald’s opinion of functional curiosity is that it only strengthen practice in reading rather than giving valuable information. Dwight considers today’s literature as inadequate and overwhelming. MacDonald believes that all reading done in present society is “shallow thinking.” MacDonald believes by skimming through the text, we become more coarse, shallow, passive, and unoriginal. I agree with MacDonald that there is a great amount of unexceptional literature all around us, but MacDonald does not take into account the advancements in the technological world, the lifestyles of todays society and students. To begin, modern days technology has figured out a way to provided information at just about anyones finger tips, such as smart phones, tablets or, lap tops. Technology has created the cyberspace where an abundance of news can be accessed just about anywhere, such as international news to local news. Just about anything someone can think of is on the internet. MacDonald considers the internet as a collection of the globes unaffected literary works. Search engines were created to help sort through the web to find internet resources that are most relevant to the topic. For example, if a prospective car buyer searches the web to find a dealership to buy used cars, most likely more than a million different results will pop up. By having search engines, the results on used car dealerships will narrow the search down to the closes and cheapest prices in the area closest to the car buyer. I believe that MacDonald would admire search engines since they make the internet clearer of useless web pages. With the transformation of technology over the years, the way that information reaches people have