I understand something is changing in our psyche / brain with respect to focus. It is much harder to read books! There are so many articles and blog posts that lament his process. Maybe something is lost, but so much more is gained. It is a lemarkian step in our evolution. Yes we can change psyche, and do to adapt to a new environment. We have such a wonderful capacity for fluidity. I am thankful I am a creature that can evolve!
We are now differently abeled. This process is not new. Media impacts psyche. Photography changed portraiture. Writing changed the oral traditions. Cinema changed theatre. Television changed cinema. Cinematic literacy impacted on the psyche. Old movies are slow! There must be a market in re-editing them for the contemporary soul.
Books are like old movies. We have moved on. Today we read in a relational way. We read a quote by a friend from Moby Dick, with a link to the whole book, we can search for snippets, or read the condensed version, flick to a trailer of the movie, read the reviews, and search, tweet, re-tweet, Instapaper and blog as we go.
This is lamented?!
But don’t get me wrong. There is nothing that will replace a good book, or an old movie for that matter. The context has changed, expanded.
We are still learning how to be here.
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There are items like this one on how to train yourself to be in the dark:
http://infovegan.com/2010/07/26/how-to-focus
Like all exercise, different kinds of workouts work differently for different people. For me, interval training works wonders— this blog post, for instance, has taken me 70 minutes to research and write — ordinarily a blog post like this before I had this set-up would take me nearly a full day’s worth of work. More importantly though, I’m able to do things like read long articles or even academic papers — things I never used to “have time for” which really meant “had attention for.”
Look at the words in this: Distracted, shattered…
Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains | Magazine http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1
The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There’s also the fact that numerous studies—including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases—show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe.
(via Instapaper)
Walter