

The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains - razorburn
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1

======
DrSprout
>In a 2001 study, two scholars in Canada asked 70 people to read “The Demon
Lover,” a short story by Elizabeth Bowen. One group read it in a traditional
linear-text format; they’d read a passage and click the word next to move
ahead. A second group read a version in which they had to click on highlighted
words in the text to move ahead. It took the hypertext readers longer to read
the document, and they were seven times more likely to say they found it
confusing.

In other words, if you mangle a short-story and push it into a different
format from the one it was written in, it's harder to read. That has nothing
to do with hypertext.

>She found that comprehension declined as the number of links
increased—whether or not people clicked on them. After all, whenever a link
appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which is
itself distracting.

That's more a question of wordiness than of hypertext. Whether and where to
link is a very important decision in modern composition, probably more
important than word choice.

Basically, these studies are assuming that all content is created equal, and
that's far from the case. I would say it's more a question of poor web design
shattering focus - that said, much of the web is designed with the intent of
shattering focus.

~~~
billswift
It might be interesting to try that with "David's Sling" since Stiegler
originally wrote it to use an early hypertext, then rewrote it as a novel.
(Note, I have not seen the hypertext version, I don't even know if he ever
ported it to html).

------
RyanMcGreal
When movable type made cheap, mass printing of books possible, learned people
of the time worried that the widespread availability of books would destroy
the oral tradition of passing knowledge down through communities (and the
Scribes worried that they would be put out of a job).

While the oral tradition is not yet destroyed (and in fact I attended a
fantastic storytelling session earlier this year that was geared to adults),
it has certainly been supplanted as the principal means through which people
learn about the world - and thank heavens for it!

<http://raisethehammer.org/blog/1486/>

------
stcredzero
_Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to
the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes
cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning._

So then, it's like TV, only even more powerful because it's more interactive.
Web Surfing is the new channel surfing?

This makes me wonder if this is an expression of typical fears about new
media.

If it's true, then of course the Internet will be supported by governments
around the world. It appears to be a better opiate of the masses than TV. A
public which spends a lot of time being "informed" but is only informed on a
cursory, distracted, and superficial level is a public which is easier to
control. (Even easier to control than an uninformed public.) TV news and
programming in the US already seems to be geared toward producing such a
public.

~~~
olliesaunders
_A public which spends a lot of time being "informed" but is only informed on
a cursory, distracted, and superficial level is a public which is easier to
control. (Even easier to control than an uninformed public.)_

What makes that true?

~~~
stcredzero
Such a public is particularly receptive to spin. Such a public is also ill
suited to examination and oversight of it's own institutions. Such people can
think they've performed such oversight, even though they've been fooled. As
such, they are more easily innoculated against the truth with disinformation
and propaganda.

A public which is not informed resents the withholding of information. They
will seek the truth if they can and resent those who withhold the information.

------
mziulu
Wow, this is weird. Yesterday, on my work - home commute, I was thinking
exactly this. I realized that the massive usage of Internet has led me to have
more difficulties in concentrating and studying, and in general keeping focus
on a given task, while at the same time has given me an edge over less
intensive web users I know when it comes to extrapolate a more or less
superficial meaning from a resource like an article such as this, or a
discussion, or even a picture. I wonder if these two aspects could somehow
'live together', that is, have the brain 'switch' to a certain mode when doing
a certain task.

edit: and I'm kinda worried about this.

~~~
michael_dorfman
A large part of meditation practices involve learning to train one's attention
and focus. So yes, you can definitely learn to have the brain "switch" modes.

~~~
EAMiller
I agree they can 'live together' through some kind of deliberate training
(like meditation) - but also with the right tools (for example
<http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom>)

------
ynniv
TL;DR: Reading web formatted text reduces our attention span
[<http://twitter.com>], comprehension [<http://reddit.com>], and data
retention [<http://google.com>] just by having embedded links.

~~~
ynniv
I need to work on my attempt at humor.

~~~
Periodic
You do. I don't see what is humorous about it. It was an insightful statement
with a few very relevant links.

I particularly liked your linking of Google to "data retention", and Reddit to
"comprehension" (or lack there of).

~~~
whimsy
I think you're reading the list wrong. The list is...

\- reduces our attention span (blame Twitter for this.)

\- reduces our comprehension (blame Reddit for this.)

\- reduces our data retention (blame Google for this.)

There's a pretty good argument for all three, don't you think?

------
px
"We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and
gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to
sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting."

This does have some interesting implications for society as a whole. But, it
seems that individuals who are able to maintain sustained, focused attention
will have quite an advantage.

~~~
kiba
I read every single word anyway and more than often enough have to relies on
my personal memory to mettle out arguments. I also don't skims through
information.

I also eliminated all sort of information feeds except hacker news and a few
economic resource. Emails, web statistics, etc, are not worth checking out
often since they don't have much actionable insight or interesting insight.

I have a big craving for super long articles and essay just like this wired's
story. I want more just like it. (Which is also why people enjoy Kalzumeus,
Steve Yegge,T-A-W, and other writers of super long essay)

~~~
chronomex
This essay is "super long" by web standards only.

------
mstevens
Every time I read an article like this I plan to spend less time online, but
never seem to actually manage it.

Tools like leechblock do provide some help in blocking access to the biggest
distractions.

I'm working on the meditation thing a little and plan to increase.

Has anyone come up with a good structured approach to getting focus back?

~~~
may
After reading this PG classic <http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html>, I have
a machine only for work. (Which, ironically, I'm posting from right now, heh.)

I only connect via Ethernet, and often physically disconnect my laptop from
the net, so when I feel the urge to get on Twitter, HN, etc. I have to reach
for the cable again, which is enough of a red flag to get me back to work.

I've managed to keep myself from "needing" to be connected. My business
partner is great about never bugging me when I'm coding, we use status.net to
do asynchronous communication (think a private Twitter), Google Wave to
collaborate, and phones for anything urgent and plenty of meatspace every
week, of course.

When I'm coding, I have offline copies of all the web pages and documentation
I need, so I can't use that as an excuse to get online.

I also use Firefox browser profiles extensively, one for Personal stuff, one
for Work, one for <Projectname> etc. Between that and Firefox sessions, I can
leave a bunch of shit open, but come back to it when I have time.

For a while I was a night person and just hit Twitter/HN/reddit once or twice
a day, kind of got a digest in the "morning" (6 pm) and then worked all night,
w/o too much happening on the Internet. (Yes, I'm an American, yes, I know
about the rest of the world, but the point is that less happens at night and
so you don't feel like you're missing something. Now that I'm a day person for
the first time in years, I feel the urge to keep up every hour.)

I also have started exercising about half an hour a day (just a walk around
the neighborhood) and limiting my online time to mainly using Twitter as a
newsfeed, HN as a feed of interesting stuff and that's about it. I don't have
time to keep up with world events too much anymore, sadly. No New York Times
or NPR.org for me, though I usually read our little local newspaper in about
10 minutes each day.

------
tokenadult
A test I would like to see is learning abstract algebra by reading Wikipedia
articles versus learning it by reading the better textbooks, such as the Artin
textbook. My bet is that the textbook users would come out ahead by any
reasonable means of assessing their understanding and performance.

~~~
nitrogen
I did much better in some of my classes learning math, CS, and EE concepts
through Wikipedia than I did from the textbook or lectures.

Edit: possible cause: textbooks designed for selling to universities rather
than designed to educate, and courses designed to maintain the professor's
royalties.

~~~
Periodic
I would guess that it was more likely due to the pick-and-choose nature of
most courses. When I take a class, the material that is actively tested is
usually only the general concepts and only the ones the professor deems
important. Wikipedia is designed for you to be able to get a general idea
about specific topics, where a text book is designed to include in-depth and
comprehensive knowledge.

------
rmundo
Many of my friends whose jobs are associated with intense, abstract thinking
(professors, researchers) tend to "not have time" for much websurfing.
Interesting how they may have inadvertently protected their brains this way.

------
tigerthink
Your brain makes you good at the things you do. So if the internet really is
the best way to get the information you're looking for, it makes sense to
practice internet surfing instead of book reading.

That said, it still makes sense to make web surfing easier if that's possible.
This Firefox extension looks promising:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4111/>

There's definitely a lot of crap on the internet, so I'm thinking of doing
something like skimming Hacker News at the end of each day, emailing important
and content-rich articles to myself to read in the morning. It seems
relatively safe to indulge in this distractable mindset right before I'm going
to sleep, during which my mind will presumably be reset to its default state.
And by browsing the web in different modes at consistently different times of
the day, classical conditioning will be on my side. It'd be interesting to
play with other ways of using classical conditioning for this. For example,
always wear certain clothing or eat certain food during one type of web
browsing.

------
T_S_
There have always been news junkies. It's just that the price of crack has
dropped. Anything done to excess can harm you, and even if not done to excess,
give you cancer.

------
olliesaunders
Is there any evidence that what this article suggest happens to our brains
while we are on using the web affects us when we are not using the web?

~~~
tigerthink
This seems close enough:

>Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be
well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy
media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They
discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had
significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much
less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for
irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research.
“Everything distracts them.” Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As
we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the
crap.”

