Leonard Pitts Jr., the Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald, admits that he, too, has “forgotten how to read”:
I do not mean that I have lost the ability to decode letters into words. I mean, rather, that I am finding it increasingly difficult to read deeply, to muster the focus and concentration necessary to wrestle any text longer than a paragraph or more intellectually demanding than a TV listing.
You’re talking to a fellow whose idea of fun has always been to retire to a quiet corner with a thick newspaper or a thicker book and disappear inside. But that has become progressively harder. More and more, I have to do my reading in short bursts; anything longer and I start drowsing over the page even though I’m not sleepy, or fidgeting about checking e-mail, visiting that favorite Web site, even though I did both just minutes ago.
He wonders:
In an era in which everyone has a truth and the means to fling it around the world, an era in which knowledge is increasingly broad but seldom deep, maybe that’s the ultimate act of sedition: to pick up a single book and read it.
I’m not sure it’s the ultimate act of sedition (it’s hard to compete with standing in front of a tank), but it does at this point seem a good deal more seditious than, say, writing a blog or dishing a tweet. Web 2.0, we may come to discover, is just the latest opiate of the masses. If Abbie Hoffman were alive and writing his book today, he’d probably title it, simply, Read This Book.
UPDATE: On the other side of the fence, Scott Rosenberg says that, despite years of web surfing, he hasn’t noticed any erosion in his ability to submerge himself in long-form writing. “When I do get the chance to sit back with a good book,” he writes, “I don’t feel any less absorbed than when I was a teenager plowing my way through a shelf of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” Which goes to show (at the least) that we can expect the same kind of variations in brain function among individuals that we’d find with any other part of our anatomy. It also convinces me that, when the Singularity arrives, I want Scott’s brain uploaded into my noggin.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Michael Agger offers a tutorial on how to write for the web (drawing on Jakob Nielsen’s research into the habits of the “selfish, lazy, and ruthless” online reader).
Following these posts, I wonder if the problem is that we are all just growing older?
I think you’re on to something with general shortening of attention spans. It manifests in a lot of ways:
— TV remote clickers and dozens or hundreds of channels, and TV programs and ads designed for channel-surfers. This preceded the internet age and shouldn’t be underestimated.
— Rapid editing/montage in films, where pauses in the action are kept to a minimum. Spielberg is one of the few popular directors who knows when to insert a slow passage in a film–it’s becoming a dying skill.
— A computer on the web is the ultimate channel clicker, with its eye-motor gratification cycle and the physical strain of sustained reading off a screen. Animated or even video ads accompanying text also distract.
— Mobile phones are channel-clickers for people, and interrupt direct conversation.
— Conversation itself seems to be affected. I have fewer long talks with friends, on the phone or otherwise, and I miss this a lot.
Nick,
Just in case you haven’t read it yet, there’s a NY Times article that talks about some of the topics you, and some of readers’ comments, have brought up recently. Here’s the first paragraph of the story:
“The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.”
So it’s not just the web anymore (i.e. laptops and good old PCs). As more and more of our mobile devices erase the thin line between what’s a computer and what’s not, we take our insatiable hunger for information and “being online” on the go. Productivity and concentration seem to be the biggest losers.
Multi-tasking and atomization of attention is just a (futile) response to the acceleration in pace of modern life. The latter is nothing new (remember Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film “Koyaanisqatsi”?), and business’ ever-increasing demands on employees’ time has to bear some blame.
When combined with electronic leashes like Blackberries, it leads to precisely the sort of behavior you describe: ineffectively flailing about, and ultimately to karoshi (Japanese clinical term for death by information overload). The news is just that this attitude has trickled down to other segments of society like teenagers and college students, possibly aping their parents, possibly because they have been led into an overscheduled lifestyle by striving soccer moms.
On the other hand, a lot of the griping about short attention spans is done by pompous windbags (a.k.a. literary fiction writers) who are incensed that their turgid logorrhea is being soundly ignored by readers who have more attractive alternatives.
Ultimate act of sedition is standing in front of a tank. Gosh. That was a good reminder of the relative importance of competing societal concerns. :P
I suspect that the number of people who love/read books BI and AI are still the same.
Rather than worry about the loss of concentration amongst deep readers (which is something that is like learning to ride a bicycle, something you never forget), we should applaud the Internet for bringing snippets of facts to many which would not have reached them otherwise.
One thing I have noticed is my ability to organize my thoughts in a linear manner have gone the wayside. I think the reason for this is the PC and word processing. When I was in college, back in the mid 1970’s, I remember taking exams and writing in a “blue book” the answer to an essay test. My ability to think through what I wanted to write back then was so superior to what I can do today. When I have to write, I find myself just getting my thoughts down in my word processor and then filling in the blanks, cutting and pasting away.
I wonder if today’s students are impacted by this when they write. Heck, I don’t even know if they have blue books for essay tests today! But, I would not be surprised if today’s students are not as capable as writers (and as thinkers) because of the defragmented way we compose thoughts when writing today.
People, haven’t you heard of lifelong learning ?
Not only do you need to accept that you spend your whole life learning, but you also need to relearn and adapt your learning techniques.
Sure, the Internet breaks the way you were taught to read in Kindergarten – hardly a surprising observation. But surely you can recognise this and move on. You need to find new ways to focus your concentration as needed.
This interregnum of learning will take a while to resolve, but the cumulative sum of wider general knowledge (Internet reading) allows me to research and understand my core knowledge.
I am adapting (perhaps poorly) and trying to learn or find new techniques. Looking backwards and moaning about your inadequacy is not find a solution.
Get a grip.