Attention span
When I was younger (not that I’m old now), I used to read books as readily, if not more, than drinking water. I’m not part of the generation who grew up with things like Facebook and Twitter, but have always been heavily engrossed in computers. As a 24-year-old, I can actually remember the Apple II computer my parents had when I was little. When I was in 5th grade, I read Jurrasic Park as my first venture into higher-level books, moving away from the likes of The Hardy Boys and Goosebumps. Add to that that I was one of the few kids in my 11th grade AP English class who actually enjoyed Moby Dick, and you get a picture of the type of reader I was.
Now, I can barely even keep my attention long enough to write this blog post, never mind read the Alexandr Solzhenitsyn book I bought a few months back (I really do want to read it, though). There are some times I have trouble focusing long enough to read just a short article from Wired.com or Motor Trend. This has started to increase since graduating college in 2008: I still read a lot in college and not just for class. I know a big part of it is having too many distractions: I’m listinging to my favorite radio morning talk show right now as I type this, and I have a hard time doing things without either music, radio, or the TV on.
I feel like computers play a big role in this for me. It’s an information overload on a scale never seen before. I use reddit.com, which is nothing but information. Just looking at the four homepage tabs gives 100 links to go through, giving a combination of both pictures, graphs, and articles. And even just going on websites like wired.com will give me hours of reading. I hate to think what would happen if I let myself succumb to the dark side that is Twitter. I’d probably end up crouched in a shadowy corner, rocking on my heals while mumbling jibberish to myself. I know I’ve talked about my true feelings for Twitter in previous posts so I won’t go into that again, but it’s scary to think what the next generation of twenty-somethings will be like a few years from now. If I–as a writer by education and profession–am having trouble with my attention span for no documented medical reason, I don’t even want to know how the next generation will be.
This isn’t so much a worry with older folks, whether 30 or 70, because they grew up in a different era. Computers weren’t the rage (or in existence), and reading was all the rage. Even if these people are in-depth in the internet and social networking, they, for the most part, spent more of their lives without the internet. I’m not trying to shoot down my friends the internet and computers, but it’s a big part of it.
I realize this is somewhat of a carryover from my previous post, but I think it’s a big issue that’s hurting my own writing and even, to a point, my work ethic. My job is a rollercoaster of too much to do in too little time and so little to do I contemplate counting my hair to keep occupied. Certainly, I need to get back into writing. I’ve got this great little arena here that is my blog, and even if no one reads it, it’s a great outlet for writing. Hell, no one reads most of what I write anyway because I don’t share it with people.
