Google's positive impact on my attention span

You'll have read by now Nick Carr's article "is Google making us stupid?" (which lurked for a while behind The Atlantic's strange delaywall).

Key excerpt, illustrating the gist of the piece:

"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."

Which is, perhaps, one way that the shift of media to digital has shortened our attention span. Nick makes a persuasive case: I am finding it increasingly common to see "TL;DR" comments added to the end of long blog posts by people who apparently no longer have even the attention span to type out "too long; didn't read" in its wearisomely verbose entirety. (Though paradoxically many of them have the time and leisure to create, or at least find and copy, bored-looking "TL;DR" lolcats.)

However, as I've said before here, the shift to digital has had some very positive effects on our attentions spans too, particularly in non-text media. TV shows used to be written with the clear assumption that audiences would have a whole week to forget what had happened between each episode, so each episode was a mini-plot in itself with only a passing nod to any sort of wider plot arc. Compare, say, Gilligan's Island (a series of 98 half-hour long misadventures which could be presented to the viewer in almost any order interchangeably) with Lost (all plot arc, developing a wider story from one episode to the next). At least part of this shift of TV into longer, arc-driven forms is due to the greater facility for viewers to follow a protracted plot when freed from the tyranny of scheduled programming. With on-demand (or DVDs, or BitTorrent) the viewer can watch an entire season of Lost or Dexter or The Wire in a weekend, and the fact that audiences are increasingly choosing to watch TV in this concentrated, sustained way is affecting the form of structure of our TV programming.

The shift to digital has, perhaps, created an on-demand and attention-deficient attitude to text. But the facility to catch up with missed TV episodes at any point, and to delay watching the next one rather than being forced to fit around a broadcast schedule, seems to be the driving force behind a new televisual golden age. This is the happy culmination of a trend that began with video recorders and now lets us - as the ads say - pause and rewind live TV. Pre-digital, broadcast TV was necessarily disposable; short-form; swift-moving. TV that can be watched on demand seems to lend itself instead to a longer form, with long-term plot arcs and the legitimate expectation of sustained concentration on the part of the viewer. There are, as ever, pros and cons. As the digital shift erodes our attention to print, it improves our attention to more visual forms. It's not necessarily a trade-off with which we should be entirely happy; but it's not all bad news either.

Comments

[awrc]

I'm sure you're aware that the premise of your argument here is pretty much that of Steven Johnson's in his 2005 book Everything Bad is Good for You. TL;DR? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_For_You