An article from The Atlantic.
I pretty much felt the emotions described on the last page of the article the whole time I was reading it: "What an old-timer. Newsflash Broseph - The internet isn't going anywhere." Even while I feel his point is true (which is what makes the article interesting in the first place) and it probably does change the way we think...I'm pretty sure evolution will go on. Maybe it'll even lessen everyone's (read: the author's) fear of change.
Also...I found it pretty funny that for the first three to four paragraphs I noticed myself wanting to hyperlink the fuck out of reading the whole article. It wasn't till page 2 of 4 that I really settled in. It was funny to be living in the brain circuitry he's talking about for that first page. Go internet. ADHD my ass.
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2 comments:
That's a fascinating article. Good find, Gibbons. I've totally had some of the same problems reading books and longer articles on the net, too (I remember there was a new David Sedaris story on the New Yorker's website a little while back... I read the first page at work and didn't finish it until a week or two later when had some free time at home).
Anyway, the idea of people being able to "skip" from one piece of information to another on the net reminds me of this section in Bob Dylan's autobiography. It's where he talks about first moving to New York and living in a friend's apartment where there happened to be an attic library filled with books. He said he'd hang out in there and read all the time, but he never finished any of the books, he just skipped from one book to the next, reading what he thought was interesting and moving on to the next thing after he got bored. Sort of absorbing all these disparate thoughts one after another. And he seemed to turn out all right.
Sweet article. I don't know if it's necessarily a fear of change, though, as opposed to a reaction to the results. I mean, the lack of attention span is palpable. If a website doesn't load within seconds, I get frustrated. And don't even get me started on the teenagers I used to teach. Remember when we used to have to wait a week in between television shows? Now, it's all on the internet. It's paradoxical, too, because more information is never a bad thing (it is power, after all), but the speed at which we expect our information is increasing at a frightening speed. Sometimes, I just feel like roadkill on the information superhighway...guh-hoy! (Your last line is perfect: "ADHD my ass." Talk about treating the symptom as opposed to the disease).
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