Attention Spans Are a Terrible Thing to ... to Something ... I Can't Remember

We should use technology to push our minds to new breadth and new depth. Don't simply give up on the old technology (such as books), especially at the expense of the attention span. Technology should be used to learn about new areas in which to spend more time thinking deeply. But, online reading, online browsing will change our brains to the point that we will have trouble thinking deeply; our attention spans will be incapable of handling that sort of pressure.

What will happen as fewer and fewer books are read; what will happen as fewer and fewer teachers and professors actually require students to read the books assigned? Nicholas Carr interviewed several people for his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains; people who were students, teachers, etc. One philosophy major stands out. He no longer reads actual books. How is that possible? Another interviewee states that he is no longer able to read War and Peace. (That may not be a fair example, because I know plenty of people who make that claim and it has nothing to do with attention span). For that person, Tolstoy's novel is too long and complex. That is disheartening. People are allowing themselves to be changed to such a degree, by reading online -- only online -- that they can no longer enjoy complex and tedious tasks. Their brains are changed. Literally.

Already, people are more impatient than they used to be, in general. (No, I don't have any statistics for that, it is a personal observation). Is that the kind of world we want to live in? A world filled with impatient people who are incapable of thinking deeply?

Think about it.... if you still can.

Reading Genius

"The genius of our brain's construction is not that it contains 

a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn't." 

- Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, 31.

It's not bad enough that television kicked our attention spans' collective asses, but it prepared the way for an all out annihilation to it, which has come in the form of the internet.  Email, social media, IM: these all play a part in distracting our minds from whatever productive task we have on our TO DO lists.  Cory Doctorow, as quoted by Carr, writes that "leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant 'DISTRACT ME' sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world."  When I think of the telephone ringing, the doorbell sounding, the dogs barking at something only they can hear, the thought of having another potential distraction is more than irksome.

I'm going to say that Carr, in The Shallows, makes some rather sobering points regarding the internet's changing of the human brain.  And, as he passingly mentions, the answer is obviously not to stop using the internet at all costs.  Luddites have a difficult time uniting, with their lack of technology, which is the reason their way of thinking is an exception to actual social acceptance of the  technology they fear and loathe. But I, for one, don't want my brain to be changed in such a way that I am unable to read long, difficult works of literature, and I hope you don't want that for your brain, either.

A good idea, then, is to follow the Buddha; i.e. follow the middle path.  Use the internet to skim information, to grasp the main points of knowledge and to share our own knowledge with others; but, use books and other less distraction prone media for developing depth.  Old fashioned books for depth; new fangled internet for breadth.

Otherwise subsequent generations' attention spans won't be as long as their eye-blinks.

LINKS: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

Reading and Writing to Write

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut."
- Stephen King

I agree with this very simple-seeming piece of advice; there are no magic spells, no secret buttons, no fairy dust—unless you want them in your stories; but they will not arrive serendipitously to give you the edge to write.  King, it has been belabored by many writing teachers, points out that reading provides the tools for writing.

Thinking about this in connection with Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, I believe this advice needs to be modified with the following caveats:

• Online reading does NOT equal deep reading of actual books
• Reading like a reader must be changed to reading like a writer
• Both reading and writing should be done in distraction free environment, if and when possible

In following posts we’ll look at these in turn, with an eye toward distraction, the changes to our brains from online reading, and reading like a writer.

There will be many that will disagree with me on one or more of these points: that’s understandable, because everyone is different.  The area that I have received the most debate in is that of distraction free reading and writing.  Even Stephen King states in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft that he writes while listening to music (usually hard rock or heavy metal).  I will say that there are times when doing this can be helpful and I will go into that, also.

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Please feel free to comment, but be nice to me and to other commenters.  This is meant to be a discussion on writing and reading and comments should reflect that.  Thanks.

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