Poverty of Attention

Sam Anderson sets out in the Benefits of Distraction to put a positive spin on the all-consuming social media world we now live in. As knowledge becomes broken down into 140 word characters and 3 minute DIY youtube videos are ability to focus is under attack. While many spew warnings of a Idocracy like society, Anderson actually attempts to draw some postives from the current reality 2.0. One of my favorite paragraphs humorizes the doomsdays theories saying,

” Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we’ve all become mentally obese. Formerly well-rounded adults are forced to MacGyver worldviews out of telegraphic blog posts, bits of YouTube videos, and the first nine words of Times editorials. Schoolkids spread their attention across 30 different programs at once and interact with each other mainly as sweatless avatars."

Ultimately Anderson argues its possible our brains are rewiring themselves to actually better compute the multi-media modes of information acquistion. While the article may be considered long to the RSS obessed literaries it is very entertaining.

http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/