Internet-related Attention Deficit Disorder, or “IRADD, WTF?, QED, OMG”

For years I've been saying that I was glad I'd done one undergraduate degree/developed some writing and research skills before the internet came along. Looking at people skimming and blagging their way through degrees, I've thought "that technology you're using is making you lazy." Hell, I'm even old enough to have been forced to learn my 12 times tables, while other kids were playing around with their new-fangled pocket calculators.

Anyway, now I have even more anecdotal evidence to "back up" my gut instinct.

Three articles I've read recently (as part of my general way-leads-on-to-way google-binging) are worth quoting at length.

The first is a fascinating and sad account of "The History of Flight Simulators: Two Cambridge Inventions" by John M. Rolfe. I only got it via a Googlecache, and even that seems to be gone now.

Anyway, here's the relevant bit, from a report by Frederick Bartlett in December 1940:

"Signals in the periphery of his field of attention tend increasingly to be neglected. Thus he will fail to respond to a falling indication fo the petrol gauge by turnign on to the reserve supply. He becomes increasingly distractable. And, increasingly, feelings of bodily discomfort begin to obtrude upon his consciousness. If he becomes aware of his diminised accuracy of performance, he is apt to attribute this, not to his own shortcomings, but to imperfections that have developed in the apparatus."

Then Nicholas Carr asks "Is Google making us stupid?"

The whole thing is worth reading, as opposed to "skimming"

As in, he quotes a "recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London"

"It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."

Personally I think Carr's gloss on Frederick Taylor is a bit crude, and historically inaccurate, but there's plenty of other good stuff here-

"The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

and

"As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

From that article on Atlantic Monthly, I was only a click (after stopping for a breakfast of pancakes) from this-

The Autumn of the Multi-taskers by Walter Kirn

Oh, the whole thing is good.

"But on to the next inevitable contraction that everybody knows is coming, believes should have come a couple of years ago, and suspects can be postponed only if we pay no attention to the matter and stay very, very busy. I mean the end of the decade we may call the Roaring Zeros—these years of overleveraged, overextended, technology-driven, and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human energies in the dream of infinite connectivity. The overdoses, freak-outs, and collapses that converged in the late ’60s to wipe out the gains of the wide-eyed optimists who set out to “Be Here Now” but ended up making posters that read “Speed Kills” are finally coming for the wired utopians who strove to “Be Everywhere at Once” but lost a measure of innocence, or should have, when their manic credo convinced us we could fight two wars at the same time."

and this

"The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it."

Clifford Stoll made similar arguments in a book called "Silicon Snake Oil", which I rather liked at the time (1996 or so).

Of course, this whole- "growing up offline" was a trade-off - in the 70s and 80s I went around expecting the crispy end of the world any and every day. Now we've got the squishy, and slower, end of the world to worry about. So it goes.