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Entry tags:
The Darker Side of Technology or Why I Can't Read Anymore
Recently I find myself not so much reading as just sort of staring at words until my eyes get tired, not absorbing any information. My eyes move across the page, but my mind wanders all over the place.
Increasingly--through my own observation and others', particularly a conversation with Jonni tonight--I'm starting to think the internet is to blame. Specifically, the high-speed internet. Because despite moderate internet use before going to Scattergood, it was all on dial-up, so it didn't really effect my attention span. But now... I can't seem to concentrate or focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I multi-task constantly--right now I have 4 internet windows and an msn conversation on the screen. To be fair, one of the internet ones is Pandora, but that's another thing: I listen to music constantly now.
I'm not saying multi-tasking is itself a bad thing. Today in Philosophy lectures I was folding a paper snake through most of them, but that's a repetitive manual activity, and I could still listen actively. In fact, I think my notes are far clearer today than most of them have been lately, as I usually try to write down far too much and end up only half-hearing and missing the important stuff. But this internet thing, all of these involve the same sort of mental activity--it's not so much 'multi-tasking' as just switching back and forth between doing several different things.
And none of those things are work. I think one of the problems is that all of my work at the moment is just reading. And reading is essentially passive, and leads to the sort of mind-wandering described above. When I'm actually doing something, it's easier for me to make myself concentrate, but reading... it just doesn't seem to work for me anymore.
I think I might start limiting my internet time. I usually blame my lack of pleasure reading in term-time on the fact that I have to read so much for classes, but I suspect it's really much more to do with the fact that I can't seem to read anymore in general. When I didn't have internet this summer, I didn't read much for the first week or so. After that, though, I read plenty, far more than I do even for classes here, although to be fair I was reading novels, nothing dense or academic.
Increasingly--through my own observation and others', particularly a conversation with Jonni tonight--I'm starting to think the internet is to blame. Specifically, the high-speed internet. Because despite moderate internet use before going to Scattergood, it was all on dial-up, so it didn't really effect my attention span. But now... I can't seem to concentrate or focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I multi-task constantly--right now I have 4 internet windows and an msn conversation on the screen. To be fair, one of the internet ones is Pandora, but that's another thing: I listen to music constantly now.
I'm not saying multi-tasking is itself a bad thing. Today in Philosophy lectures I was folding a paper snake through most of them, but that's a repetitive manual activity, and I could still listen actively. In fact, I think my notes are far clearer today than most of them have been lately, as I usually try to write down far too much and end up only half-hearing and missing the important stuff. But this internet thing, all of these involve the same sort of mental activity--it's not so much 'multi-tasking' as just switching back and forth between doing several different things.
And none of those things are work. I think one of the problems is that all of my work at the moment is just reading. And reading is essentially passive, and leads to the sort of mind-wandering described above. When I'm actually doing something, it's easier for me to make myself concentrate, but reading... it just doesn't seem to work for me anymore.
I think I might start limiting my internet time. I usually blame my lack of pleasure reading in term-time on the fact that I have to read so much for classes, but I suspect it's really much more to do with the fact that I can't seem to read anymore in general. When I didn't have internet this summer, I didn't read much for the first week or so. After that, though, I read plenty, far more than I do even for classes here, although to be fair I was reading novels, nothing dense or academic.