The Internet is Shitting on my Attention Span
As I have mentioned before, I have the attention span of a hummingbird. It is not my fault though – I blame the internet. I used to be able to sit down for 45 minutes and enjoy reading a book. Now I can barely sit still for 5 minutes in the bathroom and scan a magazine while I take care of business. I am so used to seeing information in 30 word chucks that it has become difficult for me to focus for the amount of time it takes to read something longer than a standard CNN article. It is pathetic but has become a reality. The way we consume media has fundamentally changed. Communications in general have moved from longer more in depth articles and ideas to bite size pieces of information we read, process and discard almost immediately. Substance is sacrificed for immediacy and the information turns into a summary of a summary based on someone else’s summary. This boils information down to almost nothing of any real importance.
*sidenote* I realize that there is depth for those who go out and look for it but most people won’t and the majority of individuals use the same means to find their information. Google is the leading search engine and it handles almost 80% of the world’s web queries. Homogenization in search techniques leads to a pool of information being controlled by one organization. Whoever comes up higher in the Google search is the defacto expert and that information is treated as more valuable than something that lands lower in the search rankings. In this case popularity is more important than being true to the facts. *end sidenote*
Instead of fewer more in-depth communications on a subject we are bombarded by superficial information on a multitude of different topics. Most people now know very little about a lot of different subjects rather than more about any one topic specifically. The amount of information that I am expected to absorb and process is staggering – it is not surprising that my thought process has changed to accommodate the new way in which I handle that information. Repetitively looking at work emails consisting of no more than 100 words or brief articles on the web that I skim through has trained my cognitive process to be more efficient at processing smaller, more frequent bits of information rather than focusing to get a deeper understanding of what I am viewing at any given point.
A good example of how communications work today was the way the media handled the economic collapse of last year. The market took a shit and everyone was wondering what the fuck was going on – Internet and other mass media outlets clamored for ANY piece of information that MAY have been useful – true or not. This information was disseminated through blogs an other media outlets in bite-sized chunks, many of which turned out to be unsubstantiated. Viewpoints from this expert met with dissension from that expert and one “unnamed treasury official” contradicted another “unnamed treasury official” creating a cacophony of voices that was hard to understand. The news cycle turned into more of a rumor mill of whatever a particular person was saying at that given point rather than a presentation of facts. There was no pause to take in what was happening and create a coherent picture of what was happening.
I can’t even imagine what is going on with students at this point – it must be an absolute disaster. I am sure that kids are taking reports directly off of Wikipedia or some other source of “half-true” information. Trying to find truth out there for actual research must be daunting – there are so many false sources on the Internet. At the risk of sounding old – I think there was some value of looking up the information that I needed for projects by going to library and looking through the information there. Information at your fingertips at any time is beneficial but not if it is the wrong information or does not flesh out the subject enough.
My main point here is that everyone thinks that we have this huge wealth of information at our fingertips with the internet, however, much of what is there is the same message repeated or far to shallow to be of any real value. We have trained ourselves to not dig into subjects much deeper than a surface level and forget much of the information we gather the moment we move on to the next topic. There has to be a happy medium somewhere – in the meantime I need to find a way to get my attention span back up to at least “squirrel” level.
Has your focused suffered since the advent of the Internet?