@chris: Nah, my audience tends to be very clueful. :)

@Alphast: Very good point. Perhaps our attention spans are not changing at all – we just are much better (and more interested in) measuring it now.

I mean, back in the day no one even knew about disorders such as ADD/ADHD and kids who could not pay attention were simply whacked with a yard stick.

I would contend that Internet does not alter our minds more than the pocket calculators of 80’s did. We mostly modified (at least some of us) our way of thinking and processing information. We learned to learn and to find information on line, instead of memorizing its place in libraries, books and other physical supports.

Is our attention span modified? Probably a bit. Nobody maintains his/her attention for an hour or more any more. When I was a kid, it was expecting from me for at least two hours (a standard high school course in France at the time). Researchers tell us nowadays that a teenager can’t do it for more than 45 minutes. Is it that today’s teenagers have a worse attention span than my fellow pupils then? I doubt it.

I think that the school system and society at the time didn’t care about our attention span at all and concentrated more on discipline. Result: we were swallowing the 2 hours, our attention was probably ok for 1 hour and as a result we probably reminded a third of the course. Good pupils would catch on at home while bad ones (or ones with less supportive parents) would fail or lag behind. I believe that our attention span is the same nowadays, but now there are researchers interested in it and trying to measure it…

i was trying to take it easy on your possibly clueless audience. ;)

@chris: You are doing it wrong. You should have said:

TLDR

No one who posts TLDR has the attention span to actually type the whole thing out. ;)

too long; didn’t read.

@jambarama: You know, that’s a good point. Obtaining this type of evidence would probably be difficult. I guess my reaction represents the other side of the coin:

Whenever I see media suggesting that X causes Y I immediately assume that this is yet another case of correlation vs. causation confusion. Too many times I have seen a news story unfold like this:

Scientific paper: There is a strong correlation between X and Y but it is too early to tell whether or not X actually results in Y.

Scientific press: New study suggests that X may possibly cause Y

Mainstream press: Strong evidence suggests that X causes Y

Mainstream TV: Scientists warn that X causes Y

Fox News: Mass chaos and panic erupts when scientists prove that X causes Y. Your life may be in danger. Tune in at 11 as we cover this shocking revelation.

You might be right. Perhaps we are simply adapting to our technology. For example, why hang on to random bits of data when each of us carries the sum of human knowledge in their pocket (ie. internet enabled phone + Google). Since we can look stuff up so easily, we simply no longer need to rely that much on memory. We prioritize remembering other stuff instead.

Also, we can’t rule out the realities of modern office environment on attention span. Most office workers these days are expected to balance their daily tasks, answer the phone and respond to email in a timely manner. And since these days we work with electronic data, employers expect much shorter response times. Back in the day when an average employee did not have a phone or a computer on the desk they had much less interruptions. Also, each task took much longer since it had to be done manually.

These days our work flow is constantly interrupted by barrage of emails and phone calls which require instant reaction, and therefore constant context switching.

So if I was to blame anything for shortening of attention span, I would blame that rather than the internet itself. After all, during an average week we spend solid 8 hours a day at work, and have only a fraction of that time to just browse the web and bulshit around on the interwebs.

Still, I don’t really think my attention span is shorter these days.

Sorry that first paragraph was supposed to be a quote, and the actual quote isn’t me quoting myself, it is me quoting the post.

I’m a scientist, technologist and a geek at heart – I need data. Not statistics, not surveys, not anecdotes. I need data collected in formal double blind studies run multiple times with different population samples in different conditions to rule out simple correlations. Until we have that I will dismiss the “technology is making us stupid” rants are Luddite fear mongering.

Unfortunately, you’re not going to get that type of data. How would you do double blind studies like that? Block half the participants from any media for a year or more? Seems unlikely you’ll get a sample of sufficient size. Moreover, how do you do double blind? There is no sufficiently convincing fake internet you could give half the participants.

While anecdotes are clearly insufficient, sometimes we just can’t get the data we’d like, and we have to make decisions on what we have. This isn’t an ideal world. You can choose to dismiss anyone who thinks differently as a “luddite” but I’d suggest that says as much about your willingness to consider the available information as it does about their willingness to jump to stupid conclusions.

Technology is most certainly not making us stupid.

I suspect you’re right, but much of that atlantic article rang true with me. My attention span is shorter. My ability to concentrate has decreased. I can’t sit down and read through a book anymore without skimming or becoming distracted. I remember far less than I used to, now I simply know how to look it up. Leaving aside whether or not that’s a good thing (I’d argue it isn’t), I’m not sure technology is the cause, I don’t know what is causing it. Maybe increased input sources and workloads are the problem. Maybe it is just me getting older. But maybe technology is the problem, I’m not crossing it off the list.

You may be interested to know the atlantic ran a rebuttal of sorts to the Carr article. The new article basically argues we aren’t capable of effectively dealing with the amount of information we’re surrounded by, and that services like google are part of the solution to the problem not the cause.

@Luke Maciak & @Zel: Let me be clear. I was NOT trying to argue that we’d all be better off if we threw away our laptops and learned how to make fire by friction. Obviously, certain facts are more or less valuable depending on context.

My point was simply that I don’t think that the *amount* of raw information an individual person has / processes has changed very much. I think that when people say that, they are invariably categorizing certain kinds of facts as “information”, and other kinds of facts as “extraneous noise”.

Now, it may be true that, as whole, our society’s store of raw information might be larger than it was before. (I mean… six billion brains is a lot more storage space.) But I don’t think that necessarily means we’re any smarter than we used to be.

@Anand: I agree with @Zel on this. The questions you pose is useful knowledge if you are going camping, or are preparing for end of civilization. But how often would I use that information in my real life as a couch potato computer programmer?

Why would I need to know about 10 most common edible plants around my house if I live in a walking distance to a supermarket that is stoked with food, and bunch of restaurants that serve cuisines from all over the world.

Why would I need to know about knots? If I want to tie or fasten things together I can use those disposable plastic that you loop around, tighten and then cut off when you are done. Or superglue.

And why would I need to know when was the last full moon? I mean, unless I’m planning a Werewolf related prank I really wouldn’t need to know this. And if I wanted to know it, I could easily look it up.

The thing is, that we all carry portable knowledge with us. We can easily google shit like that using our phone. 40 different knots? No problem!

We don’t really need to remember these kinds of facts. These days we are geared more towards storing meta-information – facts about where too look up other facts.