There seems to be a growing popular perception that the Internet is ruining our attention spans. I disagree.
Have you ever found yourself on a plane with nothing to read but some horrible in-flight magazine? Do you actually finish the articles, or are you a skimmer? I’m a skimmer, but I don’t think that’s because I have a poor attention span.
Choosing not to finish reading something you have no interest in isn’t a sign of an attention deficit, it’s a sign of good time management.
In his article, “Is Google making us stupid?”, Nick Carr discusses a study of Internet research sites: “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.” From the study itself: “users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts.”
Hmm… So it’s a problem that researchers, who are searching through massive databases to find articles on a specific subject, are choosing to rule-out the relevance of certain articles based merely on their abstract? What are the abstracts for again? Oh, right!
Steven Johnson makes a convincing argument in his book, Everything Bad is Good for You, that our attention spans are increasing. As I pointed out in my post yesterday, YouTube videos from US presidential candidates tend to be more popular if they are longer.
The Internet has a lot of amazing content. But unfortunately, it has even more that wouldn’t make it into that in-flight magazine. It is part of human nature to skim and discard multiple pieces of content until we find something worth focusing our attention on. Today’s technology just allows us to do this on a much wider scale.
That’s a good thing.
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[...] for information on the internet. Rather than reflecting distractibility, I would argue (as does Will Dick in Wikinomics) that it is a time management skill to be sought and [...]
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