Do You Have the Attention Span to Read This Post?

It all started when a friend of mine was talking about her experience teaching high school kids. We were on the subject of plagiarism and how the web enables it. The conversation shifted to the larger issue of IAIQO: Instantly Accessible Information of Questionable Origin, and that's when I learned something unexpected.

"My students don't check their sources and don't check the facts; they just cut and paste," my friend said. "But it's not because they're lazy. It's because they don't even understand the basic concept of synthesizing information, drawing their own conclusions and writing them down."

Wow, that's scary, I thought. It's as if the web is actually changing basic human cognition.

Enter the Atlantic Monthly. This month's cover story ("Is Google Making Us Stoopid?"), absolutely floored me with these opening remarks from author Nicholas Carr:

"I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

What floored me was the realization that Carr was describing me. I've had this exact same feeling lately, and I've been getting a little worried. Is my reading material just not as arresting as it used to be? Is my brain beginning its inevitable decline already?

Now, after finishing the article (well, almost... I got distracted), I'm wondering if technology is actually changing the way I think. I had come to think of A.D.D. as a scapegoat among adults--an enabling acronym used as cover for people who just don't like details. On the marketing side of things, I've long thought that the line of communication demarcation was the age of 30: over 30, narrative good; under 30, just show pretty pictures (or ask them to talk about themselves). Now it looks as though there's more of a spectrum at work, with the lines getting blurrier as human brains adapt themselves to the media we use, rather than the other way around.

I don't know what else to say about this development, except that in the course of writing this, I've received five emails and two IMs, checked the Dow, added my sister to my Facebook friends and... wait, my son is crying about something.

Did anyone make it to the end of this post?