Internet ADD

About a week ago, I saved a link to an Atlantic Monthly article, "How the Crash Will Reshape America." I had read a short summary of the article on the Daily Intel, and was interested to read more (to summarize the summary, the author of the article argues that the economic crisis will be good for intellectual/artistic magnets such as New York, but bad for mass suburbs in the sunbelt, like Phoenix). The link was saved to my computer for several days - one of the many tabs I typically have open on my browser. But each time I would start to read it, something else would catch my eye. It wasn't that the article wasn't well written or compelling, but there were so many other distractions at my fingertips. Someone would start chatting with me on gmail, or a new photo would be posted of a friend on Facebook, or an interesting new blurb would appear on Gawker. While I consider myself an expert multi-tasker, I couldn't allow myself to really get into the article fully. Eventually, I broke down and simply purchased a copy of the March Atlantic and finished the article before the end of the day.

Although I had initially intended to blog about the article (it is a recommended read), I find myself more interested in the actual process of me attempting to read the article reveals. While I am not someone to shy away from reading articles online - the Internet is really only an adequate medium for certain types of articles. When I'm reading an article online, I'm generally doing 10 other things at the same time. This makes the short blurbs and links on Gawker and Daily Intel ideal, but anything much longer seem burdensome. If print media really does disappear entirely, there won't be much of an outlet for these in-depth "think" pieces (to quote Almost Famous) and features. When I took newspaper layout and design, we talked about how there are very specific statistics on how much of an article people read: who makes it past the lede, the nutgraf - the minute few who follow the article past the jump. I can imagine these percents are much smaller for those reading articles online. This seems especially detrimental to magazine and feature pieces, which are written to be read from start to finish.

I also can't help but pull a little Psych 101, and wonder what kind of impact this modern consumption of media must have on the brain. OK, OK, I know this is kind of a stupid supposition, and probably one that has had tens and thousands of studies done on it, but I'm nonetheless intrigued. I feel like my attention span has shrunk significantly since I've owned my own laptop. Grant you, I'm a much better multitasker, but I rarely have my full concentration on one thing at a time. Often, I'm typing, reading, talking, and watching an episode of CSI on Netflix's Watch Instantly feature simultaneously. Since I have no television, and watch all my movies, TV, on my computer - I've found that I can rarely actually watch a feature film the entire way through. Otherwise, I get distracted by the other tabs and other things to do. If this has noticeably impacted my attention span, imagine what it would do to a child whose brain was still forming?