I was reading this article in Slate about how the internet encourages our innate obsessive “scanning” behavior, and it made me a bit nervous.
I know for a fact that my attention span has withered to nothing over the past few years. Even now, as I write this post, my attention is wandering from one thing to the next. In fact, just starting this post was an exercise in attention wanderlust.
Everyone has heard of the experiment where rats had electrodes in their brain that stimulated the “pleasure center”. The rats kept pushing the button to stimulate themselves no matter what, forsaking food, sleep, etc. This article claims that new research suggests the rats were not stimulating the “pleasure” part of the brain, but rather the “obsessive scanning” part. It became more important to focus on the behavior of stimulating themselves than the stimulation itself. And the analogy is that jumping around on the search engine is doing exactly the same thing to our brains — and permanently rewiring us in the process.
The funniest part about this article was that it was LONG. I had to fight really hard with myself to stay tuned into reading the article and actually finish it. I kept having to remind myself how ironic it would be to stop paying attention to an article that was trying to explain to me why the internet is killing my attention span. It actually was well worth the read, though, and if you have the self discipline I’d recommend making it the whole way through.
I’m bothered a bit by the hypothesis that we only collect information on the internet because it appeals to some obsessive behavior. Having ease of access to so much information certainly forces me to obsessively sift through it, but part of what is happening right now with social networking is that all this obsessing is actually beginning to organize some of that info, and making it less necessary that I obsessively scan through EVERYTHING. I can now spend a bit less time scanning through stuff that my friends, family and colleagues have organized for me. Of course, without all this convenience, we’d be scanning through a lot less information, but I think it’s very exciting to have all this stuff at our fingertips.
Just because the availability of huge amounts of data is brand new doesn’t mean we won’t figure out how to process it better. I imagine we’ll look back to this period of time and say, “wow, look how hard it was to aggregate information efficiently back then! It’s amazing we got as far as we did given all the constraints that used to exist!”
