Reading this Blog Could Be Hazardous to Your Attention Span
Nick Carr has a thoughtful piece called “Is Google Making Us Stupid” in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. It suggests that the Web is shortening our attention span, and “chipping away [the] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” He cites research finding that users of the Web exhibit “’a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ‘bounce’ out to another site.”
If you haven’t already bounced to another site, I should say quickly that of course Nick is technically correct. This piece has his usual accuracy and perspicacity. The Internet is undeniably changing the way we read and think. Yes, you’ve shortened your attention span by reading this blog; you’re addicted to the literary cocaine that Google and the Web and email provide. If you’re younger than 25, you’ve probably already muttered “get over it” and moved along to Twitter.com.
But what, one might ask, is the point of pointing this out? Should a blue-ribbon commission be appointed to study ways we can halt the rotting of our brains? Should the Internet be banned in Boston? When George Bush finally leaves office and spends a lot of time on “the internets,” will he wish he had fought a war on online content rather than terrorism?
No. Nothing’s going to happen. Our neurons will continue to crave and be gratified by the stimulation they receive online. Once a new medium has been invented, we never go back to previous eras of literary languor. Despite many articles similar to Carr’s decrying the influence of television on the brain, we still watch, on average, 4 hours and 26 minutes a day of it.
The only possible way to take action, which Carr doesn’t even suggest, would be for individual readers to voluntarily change their own habits. Not much of this will happen either. For example, while Nick decries the fact that new emails appear on his screen while he’s consuming more substantial information fare, I’ll bet he hasn’t disabled that function (although it’s easy to do in most email clients). I know I haven’t.
All we can do is adapt. While Carr bemoans the fact that the first few pages of the print New York Times are made up of a news snippet index, it would be irrational for the Times editors to do otherwise. It would be irrational for Tolstoy to write War and Peace today. It would be irrational for The Atlantic not to put most of its content online. And it would be irrational of me not to make my next book shorter and snappier (let’s be candid; most books, including mine, shouldn’t be read word-for-word anyway). Informational nostalgia may have its partisans—and I sympathize with them—but they won’t prevail.
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Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, where he also leads the 
Comments
I disagree with both you and Nick. I think that just like machines made us physically lazy, technology tools could make us mentally lazy. But, just like sports came to our rescue,'second life sports' would come to our rescue.
http://blog.amusecorp.com/index.html/227
- Posted by Vasu Srinivasan
June 11, 2008 7:31 AM
It is easy and appealing to decry new "things" and concepts we don't understand yet, and perhaps Nick would be among those who at first thought the printing press invention led to loss of content quality. I made similar lapses of judgment myself when I lashed out against "Social Software" for Enterprise in my blog www.evolutionofbpr.com, before I figured out how the concept could be deployed constructively. It surely seem that with enlargement of audience the quality of content appear to sink to lowest common denominator, but at the same time that denominator starts to rise slowly. Technology acts as an amplifier of existing tendencies, not changing them IMHO, and we all find the best ways for us to satisfy our intellectual needs. If you contemplative person, you probably will not become a fun of Twitter, but turn off your Skype and start blogging :)
- Posted by Gregory Y
June 11, 2008 12:54 PM
on the other hand it forces authors to be more precise and to fill text with content. i think that ability to compare news from three newspapers in one hour makes readers also able to eliminate worst content providers.
e.g. i am a business student and i must admitt that i believe that a smart person would be able to make 20 pages of many 100 pages long business books that are filled with content + 80% of meaningless sentences that on the other hand can make reading more pleasureable.
i was even wondering if it would be possible to make a complete and conscise compendium of all or almost all management topics eliminating useless content from books and e.g. publish it on the internet as a compendium available for everyone of course assuming that business knowledge can be like an instruction more that academic topic. for example focusing on sentence such as: "the conclusions from this book for business would be the following.."
but of course there are also other topics. like publicists i suppose. i think they can loose their impact in electronic media a bit.. their long articles related to e.g. politics loose their meaning a bit in this information overload. do they really manage to be up to date with everything.. i think they can loose their impact..
and another issue are e.g. humanities where beauty of language still matters
- Posted by Ana
June 11, 2008 1:49 PM
Hi Tom:
Loved that blog you did on attention span and Google and that whole... thing. And I totally I mean that. It links up with the whole culture-of-participation concept and the overthrow of conventional media by the blogosphere. I'm sure you saw that piece in the Huffington Post that went into the whole Hillary pantsuit thing and the color choices and I mean what was she thinking? Who was advising this woman? My aunt wore a taupe pantsuit but she weighed 270 pounds and was not running for president. Actually, she had trouble fitting through conventional door frames. And weight management is so important to self-esteem. That could not have been be clearer from the latest research that I skimmed a synopsis of on WebMd. Anyway, I think your piece got right to the heart of all of that, as well as many, many other related issues. And I mean that.
Best, Joe
- Posted by Joe Horvath
June 11, 2008 3:00 PM
I thought that the Internet was saving me as my memory was failing naturally.
In any case, Tom, Scientific American states that there may be compensation in that blogging is making us healthier:
see http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-healthy-type
- Posted by T.J. Elliott
June 12, 2008 9:09 AM
All this reminds me of a book (yes, a book) I read back in the 80's. It may be ironic (always hard to define) that I can remember neither the the title of the book or the name of its author. What I do remember is:
1) the book was about use of information, and featured many different ways of packaging its content: sidebars, sideways writing along the edge of pages, and more
2) and I remember one central point of the author's: you don't have to remember anything if you know where to look it up
This was pre-internet, even pre-Compuserve and such. So now we have this great resource that can tell me almost anything about anything any time I want, and I use it for that all the time. Trivia contests are now irrelevant.
Reading anything of length on the web has a couple of drawbacks: navigating multiple pages...and that attention span you mention. Also, what if your PC crashes or your connection goes down before you finish? So, if I want to really read something, I pick up a book or a magazine (when magazines ask if I will take an electronice version over paper, I always say no.)
So I guess thats my point: PCs and the web are not the best platform for straight reading; their interactivity simply leads you to doing something else... like writing!
David Wright
http://stores.lulu.com/dwwright99
- Posted by David Wright
June 12, 2008 12:40 PM
The skills of being able to articulate yourself clearly and concisely is one that becomes even more important in the world of limited attention spans. Being able to pick out the key points and to present these in an engaging way are the differentiators for success on the web.
Chris
http://learn2develop.blogspot.com
- Posted by Chris
June 14, 2008 6:33 AM
In reply to David Wright, I believe that book was "Information Anxiety" by Richard Saul Wurman, 1989. (Updated since then.)
-- Tom Bodine
- Posted by Tom Bodine
July 2, 2008 12:37 PM
Leslie Siegel blogger queen agrees with this article because http://www.perezhiltonlesliesiegel.blogspot.com has been up for 2 years and in the past 6 months blogger queen noticed that people were looking at the images and celebrity photos more than reading the articles that went along with the gossip. perezhiltonlesliesiegel.blogspot.com has went from daily hits of around 30 to 35 and has skyrocketed to 250 hits per day and it's all photos and quick images they look at like if you put "Oscar de la Hoya in drag" into Google, you will see Leslie Siegel's blog poping up 1st page google but people are looking at the photos of de la hoya for a split second or so, and then they pop back out! If you check the blog's stats, you can see it coincides with what the article is saying and the article really is on the money because Leslie Siegel also has written a few books and they show up in blogs and can be purchased online, but those who have bought "LIVING LIFE AT THE UN PLAZA" and "LOCKED UNIVERSE COUNTY JAIL" have just skimmed and pecked at the chapters and Leslie Siegel blogger queen hopes this is not going to be a new trend, but will be adding more photos and images to her blogs, and perhaps even an audio version of the books so Happy Blogging!
- Posted by Leslie Siegel
July 6, 2008 11:11 PM