(TL;DR – Technology is killing our attention span and making us stupid, but we can save ourselves with discipline and self-control.)
Millennials have been the test case for a massive experiment.
What happens when you take a human being, and immerse him in rapid-fire sensory stimuli and instant informational gratification from the age of five and up? What happens to a generation that spends the better part of most days in front of a computer screen, glued to a smartphone, or bombarded by the choppily-edited sound-bite television that dominates the mainstream networks?
Answer: That generation becomes stupid. Supposedly, we are tech-savvy, social media,Web 3.0 experts. We are the wired generation. We are Infovores. The lecture hall echoing with the soft clicks of Smartphone keyboards is a valuable case study in multitasking.
Our language is awash in positive-sounding euphemisms for people who spend their lives lurching from one byte of information to the next. But how many of us has read a book from cover to cover in the past month? How many are even still capable of such a feat? Some of us can’t get through a blog post without checking our email.
It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, our grandparents read books that were just words on pages. No unnecessary paragraph breaks, no flashy infographics every second page. Crazy, I know. They somehow powered through entire workdays without checking their Email or Reddit once.
As a result – and you can confirm this yourself by reading books written before the age of mass communication – their thoughts were clearer and than ours. They were able to sit, concentrate, and grapple with an idea for an extended period of time.
Our present minds, beaten into easily-distracted mush by information overload, are incapable of such feats. Almost everyone born after 1940 (and especially 1980) has spent their entire adult lives over-stimulated. The result is a shallow, unfocused, unthoughtful world. If an idea can’t be compressed into 160 characters, it’s doomed to live outside the minds of all but the most self-disciplined 21st century thinkers.
So how do we protect ourselves from the information firehose? Here’s my advice:
- Manage your information diet. Don’t be a slave to instant information gratification
- Meditate. It’s not hard. Be still, clear your head and think about nothing. Which will make you think about Seinfeld. Which will make you feel guilty for not thinking about nothing, and hey don’t I have to renew my cell phone plan soon? And… OK maybe it is hard. But it gets easier, it makes you realize how little stillness there is in our lives, and its a good time fill if you’re accustomed to an hour of TV every night.
- Commit to Uni-tasking for all but the most basic of tasks, like walking and talking on the phone, or taking a dump while brushing your teeth (wait, what?).
- Avoid mass media as much as possible. Following the news is a colossal waste of time and 95% of television is soul-destroying garbage.
Your goal is to turn down the volume knob on your reality. Submitting to distraction is, at best, a complete waste of your scarce time alive.
Originally published at Freedom Twenty-Five on March 30, 2011.
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tl;dr
You succinctly defined the problem, but I believe the problem is far more difficult to solve than your list of ways to fight back suggest. Perhaps it’s paradoxical of me to demand a more lengthy and elaborate article on how to maintain your attention through lengthy and elaborate articles.
I’ve pondered on this quite a bit. I don’t believe television is the problem. If anything, television’s timespan is downright glacial relative to the behavioral patterns the Internet enables. Aside from MTV, Headline News, and Daniel Tosh, television’s demands on my attention are insufferably long.
I would also like to add that I believe the correlation between intelligence and attention span isn’t linear. In fact, it’s a gluttonous appetite for more specific information that pulls me away from the television or the book. I’ll be trying to watch television, but there’s that girl on the commercial whose name escapes me but I know she was in a Mike Judge movie. So I google her, pull up her wiki, and realize that she’s a Bukovina Jew who’s family won a lottery to emigrate from the Ukraine to escape antisemitism.
“Lottery?” I think to myself. Do Jewish immigrants really have to play the lottery along with everyone else? Don’t the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and other programs and initiatives create a sort of fast-track for them?
Sure enough, she’s got her own mini-page at the HIAS website.
Further investigation confirms my suspicion.
“Pheh.” I think to myself: “Lottery, my ass. I wonder if anybody else has commented on my InMalaFide post.” Negative, but my aunt commented on my Facebook status and my boss just emailed me about one of the reports being down at the office. I should probably read another chapter of the book I promised to review.
In principle, I would have the actress deported, but I tilt the laptop screen away from the family and google pics of her in that cheese costume she wore on that sitcom she was in.
I can’t fathom how youth will ever grasp these excellent concepts, for they’ve never known anything else but tech, being stupid – and pawns of the media.
I can’t really not multi-task. I either do it mentally or physically…but there is always some kind of switching back and forth involved.
I almost never read an entire article without stopping to read other stuff before I finish.
I am not convinced that it is hurting my quality of life though.
paige, you have like 8 kids. YOU are supposed to multitask.
What is relevant, is you learned this skill after a foundation of education. Not like today’s children (up to age 25) who cannot confront Life unless they’re given their 45th place ribbon to appease their gnawing sense of aimlessness.
Matt Parrott – Interesting thoughts on the “Lottery to Escape anti-semitism”. I agree, she should be deported. The former-soviets probably wanted them deported too.
…leads a guy to wonder about the correlation between “soul-destroying garbage” on TV and the increasingly semitic nature of mass media. Maybe there’s a movie in there – USSR2: America the Kosher – Showing now!
We were talking about this at my blog recently. I read a lot of books in the evening, as we have no tv connection and there’s only so much screen-time I can handle. I have noticed that I struggle to read a book all the way through, without switching between them periodically. I’m currently reading 4 books, but that might be because I now read more nonfiction than fiction, and the material can be quite dry sometimes.
Having small children has given me the opposite situation from most of you (although Paige might be able to relate): the Internet is where I go to escape the hectic of my real life, to speak with adults in full sentences, to drink a cup of tea and relax while reading or writing something interesting. On the rare days when my children aren’t around, I’m not online, as I’m finally freed up to do something else. For me, the internet is what I do to calm down and indulge my inner introvert.
I am a bit of a ZeroHedge junkie though, because it feeds my statistical inclinations, which my husband has started complaining about. He always says, “Why do you bother to check? You know the result will always be the same: BTFD.” Yes, but the explanation of why we should BTFD changes a bit every day. I love charts. Even the books I read tend to have lots of charts in them.
And, of course, the internet is the only place I can communicate a thought that long and complex and have someone actually listen/read the whole way through. IRL they’re usually checking their cell phones after the first paragraph.
ZeroHedge is dangerous for people who don’t understand finance. The amount of snark in some of the articles would make a Jonathan Swift blush.
Once upon a time, I actually had clarify that Swift was not actually telling people to eat Irish babies in, “A Modest Proposal”.
@Matt Parrott
Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.
Heh. I read it for the snark. Charts and snark. It’s like a slice of heaven for me, which is why I’m always over there.
Don’t get me started on the difficulties of Swift. I had an article crash-and-burn because of that very problem.
The lack of willingness to read anything long is already prevalent among the intelligentsia as well. There are many examples of classics that everybody loves to criticize, cite the most well-known lines from, but nobody actually bothers to read. A good example is “On War” by Clausewitz. It’s commonly believed that it’s a must-read if you’re a military commander, a high-level politician or a historian. The reality is that there are many copies in the libraries of all the military academies in the world, and all of them are in impeccable condition because they are seldom touched. John Keegan is a well-known military historian and he actually brags about never having read it.
i wonder how prevalent this is in other fields. How many economists have actually read “The Wealth of Nations”, for example? How many HBDers have read “The Bell Curve”?
This also partially explains why “The Prince” and “The Art of War” are so famous: they’re short, so more people can be bothered to read them.
Look at this quote about Dick Cheney. Intellectually lazy high-level people are more and more common:
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2007/sep/24/00029/
Perhaps it was good that I grew up without my own computer until 10th grade and read BOOKS.
Höllenhund,
The only people I know IRL who read classics are homeschoolers. I’ve long wondered if the institutionalization of education isn’t dumbing down the entire populace. Once you association “education” with “schooling”, you lose your tendency to educate yourself outside of school.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/openminded-man-grimly-realizes-how-much-life-hes-w,19273/
That basically sums up my position on TL;DR. I pretty much assume something is going to be worthless bullshit. Atlas Shrugged was certainly worthless bullshit that I wish I hadn’t read, and probably put me on the path of TL;DR.
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