Distractions- yeah, I could blog about that

I just finished reading this article, which is mostly standard criticism about the oncoming death of the world on account of young people's inability to focus on a single task. The real important stuff (the stuff that's suppose to scare us into paying attention):

" The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone."

Good thing no one ever smokes as a distraction...now that combination will surely kill you...

And later:

" Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal."

I heard about this study before (588 billion! woah), but here's where I got really interested:

"They [the writers and thinkers of the world] have all noted – either in themselves or in others – diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode. “I can’t read War and Peace any more,” confessed one of Carr’s friends. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

I'm a little skeptical. Certainly I find that I skim a lot of different things, and it might be that I acquired the ability through the pace of the digital age (IM, Television, cell phone, etc), but I don't think it has eroded my ability to focus on the issues that I'm interested in.

And that's really the key here- which I think these kinds of articles often ignore- the internet (or as this author says, "the digital age") has made it possible to find information (yes, extremely quickly in rapid succession) about almost anything that would ever come up in conversation. When we search for such information we tend to look for the 3 or 4 paragraph summary- but why? We do that because are interest in the subject is of a particular kind- namely, something we might call a "passing interest," or a temporary interest that has to do with whatever we are involved with this moment. These may be (and often are) related to the kinds of intense interests that some of us, as many of us as are lucky, will use as the basis for their careers, but they certainly are not the same. What "Carr's friend" really means, when he says he's lost some meditative focusing ability, is that he's bored by War and Peace.

And what I want to say, put simply, is it's perfectly natural for individuals to be bored by a variety of things. What I think Carr's friend is recognizing is that literature, like War and Peace anyway, were only a "passing" interest for him (perhaps as an English major, or a recent grad, or a strange teenager, whatever). This recognition might be a little difficult to take, as it could entail a fairly serious reflection on one's identity (oh, I'm not an english major, a recent grad, a strange teen ager, or a whatever anymore). This might scare us a bit, and one might write an article about it...

So what exactly has the advent of modern technology done by giving us incredible access to the breadth of human knowledge? Mostly, it's revealed to us the breadth of human knowledge in which any one individual doesn't have more than a passing interest.