My thanks to Linton Weeks of NPR who reached out to me for comment for a story he was doing on the impact of the Internet and digital technology on culture and our attention spans. His essay, “We Are Just Not Digging The Whole Anymore,” is an interesting exploration of the issue, although it is clear that Weeks, like Nick Carr (among others), is concerned about what the Net is doing to our brains. He says:
We just don’t do whole things anymore. We don’t read complete books — just excerpts. We don’t listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don’t sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don’t even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society. And the result: What we gain is the knowledge — or the illusion of knowledge — of many new, different and variegated aspects of life. What we lose is still being understood.
After reading the entire piece I realized that some of my comments to Weeks probably came off as a bit more pessimistic about things than I actually am. I told him, for example, that “Long-form reading, listening and viewing habits are giving way to browse-and-choose consumption,” and that “With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span.”
Luckily, however, Weeks was kind enough to also give me the last word in the story in which I pointed out that it would be a serious mistake to conclude “that we’re all growing stupid, or losing our ability to think, or losing our appreciation of books, albums or other types of long-form content.” Instead, I argued: “We just don’t spend as much time with them as we used to. It’s the cost of life in an age of information abundance.” However, “I’ll take that over life in the past age of information poverty any day of the week. More people have more access to more information than at any time in human civilization. That’s a victory, even if it does come with some growing pains.”
Anyway, make sure to read the entire essay by Weeks. Also, for those interested in more, I have discussed this issue — and my fundamentally bullish outlook on matters — here at length in past essays including:
- The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1: Saving the Net From Its Detractors [best overview]
- Book Review: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows
- Coping with Information Overload: Thoughts on Hamlet’s BlackBerry by William Powers
- Can Humans Cope with Information Overload? Tyler Cowen & John Freeman Join the Debate
- Some Thoughts on PBS “Digital Nation” Documentary
- Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society
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