Quotes About Distraction

Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas.

media aren't just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot," he wrote. The content of the medium is just "the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." P 4

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can't even get started.

But except in rare circumstances, you can train until you're blue in the face and you'd never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time." What we're doing when we multitask "is learning to be skillful at a superficial level." The Roman philosopher Seneca May have put it best two thousand years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere.

never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently.

Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.

When we're online, we're often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.

Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere."51

Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.

The experiment suggested a strong correlation "between the number of links and disorientation or cognitive overload," wrote Zhu.

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.

when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18% of it.

How do users read on the web?" he asked then. His succinct answer: "They don't."38

Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an "ecosystem of interruption technologies,

As we multitask online, he says, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove "deadly."54

Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an "ecosystem of interruption technologies," as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.23

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet. BACK

Sam Anderson, "In Defense of Distraction," New York, May 25, 2009.

their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That's not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It's also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages.