Help, I can’t read anymore!
I used to read a lot. As a child and in my teenage years, I was very passionate for books and spent a lot of time reading them. I loved fiction books, and could become so abstracted into a fantasy, adventure or science fiction world (my favorites) that sometimes people would talk to me and I wouldn’t notice at first. To this day I remain somewhat dreamy and utopian from the stuff I used to read. For example, I had the “perfect soulmate” myth for some years during my teenage years (that’s probably why I had considerably less girlfriends during that time than my friends did — or at least that they said they did).
And then there were the non-fiction books. As a child, I had several “thousand-answers-books”, that answered a myriad of questions about the world, the universe, we humans, whatever… Then I moved to science books — Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, and several other popularizers of science. I always had a thirst for knowledge. I had a dream to have a personal library full of books, and of course an encyclopedia spanning several big, heavy, leather-bound volumes with old, dusty, yellow pages…
But then came the Internet. And a few years later, Wikipedia. I quickly fell in love with both (I have been an active wikipedian since 2005), and let myself get lost in this world of quick retrieval of information and entertainment. Meanwhile, I started having less and less time to read books (and less money to buy them) as I went to university, in 2004.
I hardly noticed, but this shift to digital media has made a great change in my attention span abilities. This is not totally new to me. Back when I was in high school, several teachers got mad at me for drawing doodles in their classes (they quickly learned to ignore it after getting the right answers to the questions they’d surprise me with, attempting to ridicule me in front of the class for my distraction — I was paying attention, just not looking at them).
In university, my classmates often observed that I seem to be distracted browsing websites or reading my mail while the teachers talk, and then surprise them by asking the teacher timely questions that reveal that in reality I did listen to what they were saying.
However, in the last few years, I’ve noticed that whenever I tried to read a book, I simply got lost several times. No matter how deep or concentrated I was into the fictional atmosphere (or argument being pointed out, in case of non-fiction books), sometimes bursts of thought would simply emerge from a keyword or idea, and drive my mind away from the storyline while I followed the chain of thoughts into a conclusion. As a consequence, I often have to read the same paragraph twice or more, because the first pass was done automatically by my eyes, while the mind was going through a totally different path.
This, of course, was a problem. Initially I thought I suffered from AADD, or, a little more jokingly (though not much), NADD. But as I was reading Cory Doctorow’s post on the subject, I realized that in fact this is simply a paradigm shift that’s happening globally in the way we deal with knowledge. We’re becoming more efficient, the information is flowing faster and in smaller chunks (think single mp3s as opposed to a full CD, or YouTube clips of a TV show, or the link to AADD above which you could have followed to learn about this acronym) — but all this at the expense of a shorter attention span.
I’d say this actually is a good thing. It’s different, but not bad. Note, for example, that if people became able to use telepathy, our ability to express thought with words would quickly disappear… It’s just too inefficient and error-prone. This is not an entirely new phenomenon anyway, as Doctorow points out: there was a similar shift when we moved from an oral to a written culture: more memory on paper, longer content. More accuracy*. Now we’re moving back into shorter content, but we’re increasing its accuracy even more.
* Side note: Writing brought less inaccuracies, this is common sense. There’s a popular saying that goes “He who tells a tale adds a tail” — some people know this concept from the game broken telephone (also called Chinese whispers) — that is inherent to oral culture. Copying books by hand was much more accurate. But there were typos, that mechanical copying (Gutenberg’s printing press) reduced. And digital copying reduces them even more, as it is very easy to change a digital copy to fix errors.
For me, this phenomenon was present even before I knew the digital culture — as I pointed out in the classroom examples, or as can be deduced by my (old, by now) habit to use brackets in my writings. Nevertheless, it happened in a much smaller scale. But now, it’s spreading fast. And it’s come to stay.
