Over the past two years, I’ve felt an unavoidable sensation that my mind is slowly slipping away, and perhaps you’ve felt it too.
Reading used to be my favourite pastime. The bigger the novel, the more excited I’d be to become completely enveloped in its story. My love of reading and learning also began to transfer to digital mediums as I got older. I would get completely giddy about the process of reading long articles on various interesting subjects, and reading reports and essays was similarly a breeze.
But something has been changing. I’ve become increasingly aware of my growing inability to maintain focus on anything. I think the number of books I actually finished reading last year amounts to two, and there were about 10 others that I started and neglected to finish.
On top of this, I found it very difficult to study last year. I simply could not read any of my textbooks anymore. After a sentence or two, I would start skimming and then realise that none of the information was actually going in. I felt, and continue to feel like my intelligence is just withering away.
I spend a lot of time online surfing through various articles and blogs. But now, if I can even get through a page of an article, all the information I sift through seems to leave my brain as soon as I click on the next link. My attention span has been completely ruined, but a quick google search made me realise that I was not alone.
Nicholas Charr remarks in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? that “… my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
He attributes this struggle to the nature of the internet as a media outlet. Whilst the internet supplies us with the information with which we think, it also shapes /how/ we think based on the way it is distributed.
Information is disseminated through the internet in vast quantities, at a pace which is impossible to keep up with. So, we ‘surf’ on the face of these endless waves of data, rather than diving deep with concentration and contemplation. And as we shift the way we read and ingest information, the way we think and behave will change as a consequence.
It’s easy to see how this might be the case, given that neural pathways are malleable and adapt to our surrounding environment. Friedrich Nietzsche aptly stated in response to a change in his writing after switching from pen and paper to a typewriter that, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts”.
Social media is structured so that each story, post, or link is short and to the point. The user can therefore digest it quickly and with ease, and move on to their next dopamine hit. As a result, studies show that 59% of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked. Whilst this is testimony to our lack of attention to the articles we come across, this practice also leads to a whole range of issues such as the proliferation of illegitimate news, and a lack of intelligent discourse online.
Advertisers wage war with each other to win over our attention. New literature surrounds the theory of an “attention economy”, where attention is considered a scarce resource, and a limiting factor in the consumption of information. In a world which is increasingly designed to distract us, it is paramount that we start valuing our attention as high as these advertisers do, and try to control it for our benefit.
Considering this, all we really have at the moment is anecdotal evidence. Hopefully, some psychological experiments are in the wake and will provide us with a more in-depth analysis of how our cognition is affected by internet usage. However, it remains clear that we seem to go online to avoid traditional reading and other tasks which require more than an iota of effort before a reward is given. We opt for titles and abstracts to save us time and effort, and it is not hard to conclude that the instant gratification the internet provides is having detrimental effects on our patience and capacity for deep thinking.
So, as we begin to take on the qualities of the technology we use, we must strive to stay engaged and pay more attention to the scarceness of our attention spans. Identifying the issue is always the first step to improvement, but as an extension we can begin to search for ways to exercise and strengthen this integral part of our minds, allowing room for more focus, productivity, and even boredom in our lives.
Also watch dis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpHyLG-sc4g
Photo above by Niklas Hamann on Unsplash