Our attention spans are just shrinking. First it was because of the mind-numbing, formula-bound television that just didn't require us to think. Now, the internet feeds us snippets of information, whatever we want to know. Admittedly, it's a more cerebral activity than eating chips and watching terrible Full House reruns, but our tolerance for waiting for the right information is quickly decreasing.
I remember when I would ride the bus to high school and keep flipping through my iPod's shuffle function--I couldn't just listen to a song in its entirety because I would get bored, or I would think of another song in the middle of the one I was already listening to. Or, think of how the average student does his or her work--homework on WebAssign might be up in one tab of Mozilla, Facebook in another, maybe Gmail or Youtube in the third--we're not really paying attention to any one of those things, and so it takes much longer to accomplish anything.
Whatever is the most entertaining will grip us, at least for a few minutes. Most of what's on Facebook or Youtube really isn't that entertaining, so we've conditioned ourselves to tune out whatever doesn't grab our attention within the first few moments.
This pattern of only paying attention for a few minutes at a time is really damaging the way we work. Reading an entire blog post is stretching it sometimes. It's easier to just get the gist of things from an RSS feed, even if it's truncated. Did you even read this far?
3 comments:
I did read the whole way through :-D
I completely agree - I procrastinate so much work and waste a lot of time because I have so many miscellaneous tabs open. To curb my wasteful use of time, I gave up Facebook for Lent...
I completely agree with you Carla,
I think that I have mentioned this in class, but I think this short attention span business is affecting our social lives as well. I'll be walking to class with a friend, and I can feel like I'm not entertaining enough- she is texting another friend, and it is as if I am talking to a wall. At a restaurant, and all the more so in bars, where people supposedly go to socialize face to face, I often see more people talking/texting on their cell phones than actually talking to other people in person. This seriously bothers me. A lot.
amen! i have fallen victim to this, especially over the last few years or so. it seem like it's getting harder and harder for me to finish a book; i've given up halfway through so many of them because i get restless and bored.
recently though, i've been trying to re-condition myself to focus on the task at hand and finish readings, and i think it's really helped. difficult as it may be, the thing that seems to work the best is to just grin and bear it and get back into the swing of things.
nevertheless, i think i will always have song a.d.d. :]
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