Reading the Internet

Over the last few years I've had this growing sense that I can never totally focus on anything. I can't describe it very well. To a certain extent I experience this at work. I'll try to get something done and the phone will ring or the email icon will pop up. However, most of the time I am able to force myself to buckle down and concentrate. Work is one thing, but I'm talking more about my personal time.

There is nothing forcing me to concentrate on a single task during my free time so I cannot do it. I can't just sit and read a book anymore. I spend my time trying to keep up with my twitter feed, or skimming internet headlines from the day. I can't even seem to sit down and watch a 2 hour movie without my iPhone in hand. It is as if the way by brain consumes and processes information has changed. I've felt this way for a while, but haven't been able to put my finger on it.  Then I read this great article by Nicholas Carr called Is Google Making Us Stupid. It does pretty decent job at making sense of the feeling I had.

This article makes a lot of good points. One of the main things it focuses on is how the Internet makes available a huge amount of information we wouldn't have had access to in the past. We can easily read about anything, but it is presented in a way that encourages very surface level understanding, then moving on to something else. We no longer value depth of knowledge. We get the basics, and that is good enough. This paradigm seems to have crossed over to a lot of aspects in my life. There is an overwhelming amount of info in the world, and rather than focus on one thing at a time and really absorb it, I am more content with trying to get as wide a range of expeiences as possible. Diversity without depth.

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.”

I found the article extremely interesting, especially the ideas about the costs of moving forward with technology. There are definitely reprocussions, but the good usually outweighs the bad... at least over the general population. Thinking about myself specifically I want to understand if that is true. Would my life be better without Twitter or facebook. What do they really add? If I didn't spend my time over there what else could I be doing? Is this blog a worthwhile endeavor? If I didn't write on here is there something I could be doing of more value?