Oh… this book. I’m not the biggest fan of this book. It’s full of anecdotal evidence. If you’re going to start wildly claiming things about our brain, you’re going to need science to back it up. When I google “Are our attentions spans decreasing?” I see a lot of claims, but not actual scientific articles. Well, there was one that mentioned a study by Microsoft, but no one linked to the article and I didn’t see the past study where they would have compared the current attention span to past studies. Did they do past studies due to ADHD or actually decrease due to technology?
I decided to go to Google Scholar and see what sort of scholarly article I could find on attention span and technology. I could have been looking up the wrong thing, but I swear I was having a terrible time trying to find an article on attention span in regards to technology. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to find an article before I gave up. Now, if this was a research paper, I sure would have been pissed at my attempt to find a reliable source for the paper. Though, I’m still annoyed.
While I do believe our attention span could have changed due to technology, our culture has also been changed due to the technology. If our culture makes it ok to focus less, or for a shorter time, we’re going to adapt to that. I wonder how much of it is cultural due to the technology. I would attempt to search that, but I feel like if I cannot find an article on attention span, this was be practically impossible.
Well, while this book wasn’t terrible, I think it focuses too much on attempting to pass of anecdotal evidence as science and puts a lot of blame on technology when it could truly be our culture, or just how our brain chooses the function with a change in informational intake.
On another note. After we discussed in class about mouthing words when we read, I realized I did it. But, I only do that when I’m trying to slow my brain down and to actually understand what I am reading better. Otherwise, I can get suddenly be 10 pages ahead and no idea what I was reading.