Steve Skojec

In 2001, I was diagnosed by my family doctor as “probably” having both Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder - a combination which leads me to relentlessly fixate on things…until I get distracted and lose interest in them. (This is only partially a joke.) He prescribed a predictable SSRI drug and sent me on my way. It helped, but made me into a zombie, and I cut myself off after a few months, weathering the detox and weird side effects on my own. In no time at all, I was back to my usual, worrying, distracted self.

I’ve noticed that while my “OCD” seems to have diminished with age, my “ADD” has grown stronger. I am more distracted, more forgetful, more prone to making careless mistakes because I am not paying attention. While aging could probably explain this somewhat, I’m only thirty, and considering the clarity and reliability of my memory and attention to detail as recently as college, I find it odd that I’ve diminished so much so quickly. What was effortless to remember a few years ago - like mailing out something when I get home from work later the same day - now requires a calendar reminder in my PDA to notify me like a virtual red ribbon tied around my finger.

And then, this morning, I read this article in The Atlantic. (Not all of it yet; I’ll let the irony of that seep in as you read it.) It discusses the way the Internet - which I’ve been using regularly, even at addict-levels, for 15 years - is changing the way we think and absorb information, particularly text:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. 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.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

The way we think has changed, and looking at it from this perspective I see it. I need constant mental stimulation or I am bored out of my mind. I am extremely impatient about getting results, whatever the task at hand. When I have a question about something, or want to know a name I can’t remember, I run to google. If I am at the store and can’t decide between two products, I stand there like an idiot, fire up my PDA internet connection, and start looking for reviews on my way-too-slow connection.

When I read blogs, if the posts are long, my eyes roll back in my head and I start spinning the scroll wheel. When I go to look at an encyclical or some scholarly document to back up a point I’m making, it’s all I can do to just get to the point and cut and paste. I can’t just read through something, I have to Ctrl+F search it for keywords, or use the word tabs on my Google toolbar.

Books are another story. Nonfiction books -which I’ve ALWAYS struggled with - seem to be getting even harder to read. My only saving grace, perhaps the one thing that is keeping the knowledge-acquisition construct of my mind from eroding entirely, is that I still enjoy novels tremendously. Some - like Michael Flynn’s books - have slow pacing, and I struggle with it a bit, but I want to know what will happen next badly enough that I stay in narrative.

As for the rest, I mimic precisely what the researchers cited in the piece have found:

A recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

In a strictly adaptive sense, I suppose this shift is helpful, not harmful. We are required to process and filter ever more vast amounts of information, something that must wreak havoc on those with good attention spans. But I don’t want to become an info-zombie, cruising the Internet in my frenetic and unceasing pursuit of a fix. And yet, as I write this, I have 9 windows open in Firefox, plus my e-mail Inbox. At any point I may suddenly and without reason flip between them, mainly because an impulse strikes that I am bored of what I was reading on one, or that I have a higher priority on what I’m reading on the next. In the latter case, when I am done with the new window, I flip back.

It’s only going to get worse. The question is how to best deal with the influx of new info-sources and the way they shape our thinking without losing the more esoterically desirable habits we seem to be leaving behind.