Is Search the Answer to Short Attention Spans
August 25, 2009
I thought about the essay I read that danced around the subject of Google making me more stupid. The current variation on this theme appeared in the UK Daily Mail. The story that caught my attention was “Digital Overload Is Making Us More Easily Distracted.” The premise struck me as odd. Someone digital plumbing is altering how a human concentrates. Hmmm. I thought humans made choices about concentration. For example, I decide to read a book. I decide to read and focus my concentration of the act of reading. Ask the goslings. When I concentrate, a person can walk up to me and touch my shoulder. I will jump and sometimes let out a yelp. I concentrate. Digital inputs don’t mean anything to me when I focus. I blot out distractions.
Not for the Daily Mail’s writer David Derbyshire. He wrote:
Some neuroscientists argue that the brain is geared to handle one thing at a time. When asked to juggle several things at once, it is forced to flick frantically between them, like a performer spinning plates. This puts the brain under stress and means it doesn’t perform as well, it is claimed.
Ah, the Daily Mail is not talking about individuals who can concentrate. The Daily Mail is talking about researchers who have studied a sample composed of people who cannot concentrate because these individuals ** choose ** to put themselves in situations where distractions are the norm.
I buy that. The young driver I saw run over a bicycle was not paying attention. I thought I saw a cell phone or an MP3 player. No one was hurt, but that bicycle cannot provides its side of the story. What’s the fix? None. If people ** choose ** to create an environment flush with distractions, those folks will have a tough time concentrating.
I don’t need a university researcher to “prove” that. Obviously the Daily Mail and its editors did.
I had hoped the article would talk about the role of search. It did not. At least the author of the Google-is-making-me-stupid essay challenged my thinking. The Daily Mail’s article did not in my opinion.
What can top this study? How about USA Today’s write up about social networks making students dip into self love?
Stephen Arnold, August 25, 2009
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3 Responses to “Is Search the Answer to Short Attention Spans”
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We decide who to let do the driving – the author or teacher does the driving when we want to read a book or listen to a lecture and learn something. We do the driving when searching or twittering or emailing. Yes we have the agency to decide, but not always to know how we know what we know – as Google is ad-based first, how do we learn, knowing that the information we search for to learn from while searching is really secondary? I suggest we “know” something is strange and not straight here, as we intuited as children do what is really going on in back of what we/they hear and see. This is part of how searching engages us – while we know the ads and the entertainment are there playing with us, confusing – killing us softly – remember those lyrics? – between our interactive input and what is supposedly manipulating us, we think we are still trying just to get our work done. I suggest this is similar to driving while talking and texting and forgetting who is driving what. Are we slipping, like Randy the Ram, into the online search “ring” when we should be concentrating on “out here” where we can get real hurt and need to connect the dots?
One of the experts quoted by the Mail article is Professor Baroness Susan Greenfield, who seems to have made a habit of being quoted by newspapers on such edifying topics. Ben Goldacre has blogged about this on his excellent Bad Science site: http://www.badscience.net/2009/05/professor-baroness-susan-greenfield-cbe/ .
Hi Stephen – The Daily Mail – To follow up on Charlie’s excellent comment above – never going to be high on the list of authoritative sources of information. Your article makes a few assumptions about the level of journalism at the Mail. You might (at your leisure) dip into the articles here: http://www.badscience.net/category/media/papers-mail/ that cover other such excellent examples of journalistic brilliance.