Digital ADD
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Many people have attempted writing about how the Internet is slowly eroding humanity’s aptitude for deep thought, but they couldn’t focus long enough to type a coherent sentence.
The theory is that the Internet has made it so easy to find targeted information that our attention is now confined to the small tidbits we seek. Whereas we once read books and obtained a depth of knowledge about a small number of topics, collectively we now learn very little concerning millions of subjects.
At least I think that is what the article said. I could be wrong – got distracted by a link to a news story concerning albino catfish farmers.
I cannot confirm this is true. My attention span has eroded, but it wasn’t robust to begin with and I confess to ingesting significant volumes of Jack Daniels over the years. Both might have some bearing on my situation. I also live in San Francisco which is a contact high – no telling what illegal chemicals I have inhaled at the Fillmore or ingested at some of the more interesting parties. For other people cerebral degradation may be inorganic.
Or we may simply be witnessing the elevation of the scatterbrained class.
Few folk ever obtain a depth of knowledge about any subject. Academics do, though they study one topic to the point of functional imbecility (I knew a physics professor who couldn’t be trusted to tie his shoes). The average Joe and Jane don’t have the time, skill, inclination, patience or topic interest to plow into a stack of books to obtain information that is useless in their daily lives.
But surfing The Net fulfills an innate human desire to discover. The very design of the web was to facilitate chaining fragments of information together. Google made the fragments searchable. People with short attention spans were drawn to the Internet like suicidal moths to a volcano, rapidly exploring and ransacking info. It was once postulated that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at keyboard could recreate the works of Shakespeare. The easily distracted class never before had keyboards or a common place to commune. Now they do and we see that the original monkey postulate was unfounded.
They can discover Shakespeare, though they will be detoured by Brittney Spears.
We may not be seeing the destruction of the human mind, but the ratcheting elevation of the intellectual subclasses – folks too lazy or disinterested to visit libraries are now scanning The Net for an infinite number of interesting items (and evidently an infinite amount of pornography). This may indeed be the first small step to the ultimate enlightenment of the entire species, through slow and steady acculturation to autodidactic acumen.
But we need to keep them from voting until then.
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2 Responses to “Digital ADD”
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If you have polite and articulate comments, please provide them. Rants and flames are discarded.
Really nicely written post, pity I wasn’t able to read it all the way through.
Albert Einstein said –
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
So perhaps randomly surfing the internet is more a function of the intuitive mind or right brain which tends to make connections between things, and see’s the world as a whole, as if reality is composed of information which is intent on organizing itself into new meaning, whereas perhaps applying the mind in a focused way such as when reading a book is more a function of the rational mind or left brain which ‘narrowly focuses on the individual bits and pieces, with increasing specialization bringing more and more familiarity with less and less’ which is a tendency or disease of the western mind according to Ervin Laszlo -
http://ervinlaszlo.com/the-dis-ease-of-the-western-mind/
….I’d like to say more but am already getting distracted so I’ll just copy and paste someone’s else’s thoughts and quickly move on -
‘As many have pointed out, the currency of the Net is attention, an insight that holds true as well for the expanding empire of signs, data, and virtualities of which the Net is both part and paragon. Mindfulness cultivates and sharpens attention, clarifying the often largely automatic process wherein we “choose” to notice, to react, to link, to pass on by. The more intelligent and crisp attention becomes, the less susceptible one grows to mechanical habits and programmed phantasms, not to mention the dangerous attractors that lurk, as they always have, in virtual space, waiting to draw our bodyminds into downward spirals. The contemporary rise of attention deficit disorder, a condition seemingly linked to the ubiquity of media nets, only underscores how much we need to treat attention as a craft, at once a skill to be learned and a vessel in flight. But the name of this chronic syndrome also contains a clue. For it is precisely disorder that we need to learn to pay attention to, because in that turbulence lies our own future manifold. The mind is an instrument, and we practice scales so that we may begin to improvise with spontaneous grace.’
Erik Davis – Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information
You lost me at “autodidactic”…
Nice post! Lots of triple-word score words though. But the folks you talk about will likely gloss right over them.
Great look on the webpage! Where are the bull-riding photos? Aw, come on. Even the “mechanical” bull counts…