As someone who at one point grew up without the internet, I think I can safely say that my attention has gone out the window with the web. There are just too many things to look at now and browser tabs are constantly competing for my attention. In fact, I would blame inattention for the lack of personal success in my life. Hell, it was even hard getting through the entire article, I just wanted to skip to the end and read the comments. Ugh... sad. Also, it doesn't help that we have news feeds like Hacker News, Designer News, Reddit etc...spewing info left and right. Before the sharing of information you'd be familiar with the work of a few, now everything is out there and your access to information is pretty much unlimited - that's a lot of info competing for limited attention.
I have an interesting anecdote. When I started my CS degree almost a decade and a half ago, my dad refused to get me an Internet connection for our home. To give you an idea how uncommon this was already, during the first week an interview amongst the 375 enrolled students was conducted. I was the only one without a DSL or fiber connection at his disposal.
I was furious, but in retrospective it may have been the reason behind my success.
No connection forced me doing lots of things differently. For programming work, I relied only on offline documentation (man pages, MSDN...) and I set up my own servers instead of telnet-ing to the uni machines. The learning curve was a lot steeper, but after some struggle I was way more productive than my peers.
For freshman and sophomore theoretical courses, I simply cherry-picked top books with extreme care cause I knew I couldn't rely on help coming from the brand new forums for TAing our school had set up. Students hacked around exercises, but I had to fight the Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics and a few others.
It ended up as a huge success for me. I ranked as student #1 not only in my fairly large school, but in the whole country where a few thousands graduated from CS at the same time. This made me appreciate the value of deep and hard knowledge good books provide. Now, many years later I am struggling to return to that lifestyle while keeping some online presence...
> I ranked as student #1 not only in my fairly large school, but in the whole country where a few thousands graduated from CS at the same time.
Congratulations! I've never heard of a cross-university ranking of individual students before. Out of curiosity which country is that and how does the ranking work?
I'm experiencing the same thing. It's gotten so bad that I've had to train myself to concentrate by forcing myself to read books and watch movies without interruption. It's kind of ironic that I'm using what was once entertainment as homework. I call it Internet Brain because of a "Computing Forever" video that I watched on youtube. The fact that I live in a very noisy environment doesn't help at all.
Having been the poster child for this not so long ago, my advice to others dealing with distraction is to read about Buddhism. The Eightfold Path is basically an algorithmic approach to resolving cognitive dissonance. Dissonance can be viewed as a form of brain spam. It makes you inefficient and illogical. It's also contagious for those who aren't inoculated against it.
By finding the path and practicing it, the approach may give you access to enlightenment. That state then brings about a change in the brain which results in a quieter brain. I liken it to permanent and constantly available flow.
These are just my opinions based on experience. Everyone should find their own way to the truth.
If you'd prefer a secular angle with some scientific background, Sam Harris's Waking Up is excellent.
Reading about Greek Stoicism (Seneca's Letters are a great starting point) and Buddhism and comparing their similarities is a great way to get the best out of both.
A book that's been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read it that might also be of interest is Edward Slingerland's Trying Not to Try, which focuses on the Chinese concept of wu wei which has much in common with flow.
Keeping things sacred slows you down. Slowing down is good because it forces efficiencies as you grind toward aesthetics. As Gregory Bateson said to a colleague, "Keep your systems simple". That is mindfulness.
I'm not a fan of the term Secular Buddhism for the simple reason Gautama Buddha warned on, which is taking the concept and twisting it into something that is used to advance or elevate one person's belief over another's. We're all in this together, ergo we are Buddha Nature. No sense in complicating things.
Complications are inefficiencies. Keep your systems simple.
I think it's also important to be aware of when you're being reactive towards the web, in other words getting lost in surfing. Look at what sensations come forth when you see a link you want to click, and how automatically your body performs the action of clicking it.
Edit: I've noticed personally this behaviour gets worse the more caffeine I've had.
Do the same complaints exist from thinkers/pholosophers of Asia? I feel like there is a substantial difference in thought from the Buddhists for instance, and the zen way of thinking that encourages people to accept who they are. This idea of self-improvement, which is what's at the bottom of all these critiques of the young being inattentive and distracted, is dismantled by people like Alan Watts who claims that the reason why you want to be better is the same reason why you aren't.
In essence, people like Watts want to tell you, or convince you, that there's nothing you can do to improve, you would already be that person if you had it in you. Now I'm not here to argue whether or not this view is correct nor am I interested in reading your anecdotes on how that can't be right. What I am interested in knowing is whether or not these complaints about distraction and inattention are uniquely Western. What do the Africans or the Asians say about this through the course of history?
That sounds more like Western self-esteem teaching than Zen.
Watts was a very eclectic preacher with lots of different influences, both Western and Eastern.
For a random example of a Zen master discussing distraction, Foyan said something like "You're constantly distracted by thinking about business; how will you have time to work on enlightenment?"
And Huangbo said "If you would spend all your time—walking, sitting, standing, lying down—learning to halt the concept-forming activities your own mind, you could be sure of ultimately attaining the goal."
> The distinction between shame and guilt as methods of social control has long been recognized.
Both articles cites very few sources about that distinction being useful or acknowledged by sociology. I see both articles relies heavily on « Japanese Perceptions of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ».
Is there more substance and relevance to the concept ? What does it explain ?
I remember sitting with my father who was filing taxes, manually doing all the calculations and noting down the numbers in a spreadsheet like form. While finalizing, it took a two hour debugging session to find the mistaken calculation that had trickled down to the result.
The fact that now I don't even need to know the complexity of tax structure to file taxes let alone do calculations makes me wonder if people waste time because technology has enabled us to save so much of it.
Distractions are not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, they aid the process of discovery. The issue is that nowadays our distractions are "on demand" and "personalized", which, if we're not careful, can take away the benefits and leave us worse off.
I think the overall complain is that discovery never gives way to creating and it frustrates people. Sort of like when we spend all day reading about which programming language is the best for this and that but there are zero lines of code written at the end of the day.
i see what you're saying, but i wouldn't say never. the odd time that distraction does lead to creation could in fact be very significant. i'd be very surprised if there weren't some startup ideas born out of distraction :)
Personally I have been a victim of this, about 7-8 years ago I was so much able to sit at one place without a phone or internet and study for 14-16 Hours. And I loved how much I was able to do in a single day, but today I find reading a book or a long article so hard (Even while writing this comment I was distracted thrice by my phone beeping for attention), In last few days I have been trying hard to get back to how It all used to be but nothing has been working. We give more attention to unimportant things today than to ourself. These digital devices and options are biggest attention seeker today and once you give them the toe they will suck you up whole inside. Please help me with some methods if anyone has I would appreciate finding a way out of this digital/social mess.
You gave the device access (to yourself), you must take it away...
From the other side, I have very little social interaction (no phone or Facebook) and I'm not so sure it's a better choice. Sure, I have free time, but I am also "out of the loop", which has it's own social stigma.
It's like a drug addiction (Facebook, & to a lesser extent, cell phones). I enjoy it, but I do not accomplish anything I am proud of.
I tell myself that I am more useful when I focus on making meaningful contributions to something, rather than stroking my ego by seeking likes or upvotes. I probably just need to balance things better, but I cannot... just as an addict cannot do just a little of <drug>.
I read Nicole Taylor's "Schooled on Fat - What Teens Tell Us About Gender, Body-image and Obesity" recently and I think it has some themes related to this feeling of helplessness.
Just as the teens surveyed knew junk food was bad but couldn't resist it, we know spending too much time on these distractions is bad but we end up doing it.
Interestingly, peer influence and social acceptability seem to be involved in this too, as it was in her study. We have to get 'social' so we don't appear to be odd and 'not modern'. And the media has been a major actor in strengthening and spreading these beliefs.
I have some ways I battle this: I listen to one repetitive track without vocals on repeat, I use pomodoros (http://pomodorotechnique.com) to break my time up and battle exhaustion and sometimes I'll put my headphones on to make sure I don't get distracted.
This makes some important points but misses a big one: The authorities become concerned about people not paying attention, when the things they want people to pay attention to are not interesting.
It's not the age of distraction, it's the age of extreme information accumulation.
The consequence of the lack of attentionspan is greatly exaggerated.
Our scientists aren't getting less able to do science, our writers and musicians aren't getting less able to write or perform. Our mathematicians aren't getting less able to solve mathematical problems.
In aggregate humans through the use of technology is charging on becoming ever more sophisticated. A society without technology would not be able to have accumulated the knowledge we have today. People without ability are being helped by technology.
With the worlds collective information doubling in something that resembles Moores Law for most people it would simply be unwise to focus too much.
What I think we need to realize is that we don't need everyone to be expert specialists. We need a mix of experts specialists and specialist generalists.
That proverb seems to have many origins and variants, including religious roots.
But is idleness really the problem? One can choose to occupy one's mind with better things and even suppress negative inclinations.
