The Phoenix New Times recently reprinted an article I wrote on the effect of having too much music on how we actually listen to it. Because this is the fourth time that the article has been reprinted (original here)–and it’s still sparking random comments on random music blogs–it seems safe to say that the influence of the abundance provided by filesharing, digital storage and the internet is something that many others are thinking about.
You don’t have to be a fellow download addict to be affected by the web, from a behavioral standpoint. This great article in the new issue of The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, looks at the internet’s potential to contribute overall, more lasting changes in cognition, most notably a severely debilitated attention span. In the spirit of futurists, I’d like to present a list of behavioral predictions that I will blame the internet:
1.) A total lack of patience
2.) A lack of an attention span. (Said now to average at 400 words before we get the urge to move on.)
3.) Increased tendency to link ‘it’s on Google’ with ‘it exists.’ I was at dinner last week with a group of friends, when one said, for no reason, “I’m the only person in the world with my name” She proceeded to discuss how her first, middle and last names were a random mix of ethnicities. I didn’t ask her if she’d checked the birth records of every country to get her information. I didn’t mention that typing my full name into Google will yield no results, and yet–as both my mother and that very friend can attest to–I do in fact exist.
4.) Mistaking what’s on the internet with what’s going on in the real world. I know this may sound deluded, but with an entire generation used to getting their news online and seeing little use for newspapers and the like, drawing clear distinctions between sources becomes difficult when The Economist, Wikipedia, and The Obama File are a few links apart. We have the illusion that because we can see photos, we know for sure what’s happening in Asia. When the prevailing attitude of the Digital Native generation is: if it’s important, somebody will put it online. That’s not true, because, partially, of:
5.) The increased reliance on numbers to explain the world. When you are given the illusion of being able to quantify your friends, your popularity, your ranking on Amazon.com (a common obsession for writers), you start to live in a CSI-like “but is that really the case?” kind of world.
Businesses live in this world too. At a newspaper I used to work for, the web editor noticed the number of the paper’s hits decreasing and asked his boss for advice. (Over time, fewer hits means being able to charge less for ads and a crippling loss of revenue.) The corporate web editor, who oversaw the websites of several known newspapers in the U.S., crunched a few numbers and came up with a sure-fire slideshow to feature on the site: a series asking local strippers what they think of the locals who were, at the time, running for office–photos obviously included.
Sadly, I am not making this up. So why don’t newspapers have more thoughtful, subtle, hard-hitting stories? Because even if they don’t admit to it, people would rather read stories about strippers yapping up local politics. Even though you or the majority of people might not admit to it, web traffic numbers don’t lie. I told that anecdote to a well-known researcher, who pined, “It’s also all about fear since fear sells and keeps people coming back for more. Fear and sex. Since when did that become news? How I long for another Edward Murrow.”
Sadly, she’s wrong. It’s easy to romanticize that if there were someone with a glut of ethics in a powerful position in the media, we’d be surrounded by better stories, but that’s not the case. Even if they put out a quality product, very few people would read it. People who disagreed with it wouldn’t believe it, and would go back to Fox News or something else that affirmed their pre-existing ideas. They would search out brain candy to feed their short attention span. The cycle would continue.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
1.) A total lack of patience
2.) A lack of an attention span
Since you want to improve your Spanish…
La falta de paciencia y atención ya se daban en la sociedad antes de que Internet se metiera en la vida de (casi) todos. Hacíamos zapping por los 60 canales de cable apenas venía la propaganda o algo que nos aburría.