Does anyone else feel this way, too?
“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
–Nicholas Carr, The Shallows
We talk a lot about kids’ attention spans, but this quotation resonated with me. More than ever, I feel pulled in 10 directions in any given moment, and I want my information fast and furious. It’s a relief to sit down with a novel or book of poetry–even more of a treat if I’m alone in a non-electronic environment with few distractions. I love being online–don’t get me wrong. But I do feel like the way I gather info online is slowly but surely affecting the way I take things in offline.
What do you think?