It’s Sunday afternoon and the library is filled to the brim with students. I could barely find a seat, but there was one lone seat next to a friend of mine. I would prefer to sit alone and seclude myself so I can finish my work in a timely manner, but there aren’t many options for that on campus right now. All around me, students are on their phones, typing away on their laptops, or talking with friends. Some, of course, are actually doing their work, but often the library becomes a social place rather than one for study and quiet. After about four hours of hard work with minimal distraction, I start to lose focus. My attention is constantly dragged back to my phone or to my friend next to me. The constant accessibility and social pressure to be connected to technology could have a serious impact on our attention spans.
Looking back at the eighteen hundreds, there weren’t even phones or computers to pose as distractions. This also meant that there wasn’t access to all the information that the internet provides, or the easy communication that the phone brought to our society. However, today, many people become addicted to their phones and social media. Multitasking between technology and human interaction is ever increasing. Time is becoming a measure of how much of your day is spent with your face up to a screen. The attention span of today’s society is vulnerable to the effects of technology and distractions. There are different types of distractions, of which I researched self-inflicted, textual, and social distractions. Locally, at Lafayette College, having wifi covering campus and friends within a 10 minute walk, it can be hard to step away from our distractions.
Distractions could be having an affect on our biology and on our abilities to socialize. An interesting article by Nicholas Carr called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” discusses what the internet is potentially doing to our brains. Although it is from 2008, the material is still relevant to looking at the internet’s impact on attention. Over the years, the internet has changed and developed, which on one hand, Carr sees it as a “godsend” for him as a writer, with “immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information” (Carr). On the other hand, this plethora of information makes it easy to become distracted and takes more effort to stay focused. Society often resorts to “skimming” the web, an easy way to absorb lots of information (Carr). Carr provides relevant ideas on how the internet is affecting our attention spans, and his work can shed light on issues with social media platforms as well. Similar to the web, social media is growing into an easy and highly accessible resource for all ages to stay connected to people around the world and to current events. I believe that when we rely on these forms of technology at our fingertips to provide knowledge with the touch of a button or stroke of a key, we can lose our ability to stay focused and keep our attention on the task at hand.
Attention can be distributed and disrupted by various distractions. Jones and Hafner, authors of “Understanding Digital Literacies,” address the reasons to why this happens. An important part of their research looks at multitasking and how it prohibits one from giving their full attention to the tasks. Unlike Carr, Jones and Hafner not only discuss the idea that multitasking can be detrimental, but that it could be productive in certain ways. Digital media, like video games and social media platforms, are growing parts of society that Jones and Hafner connect to distributing attention and focus. They discuss the economy of attention, where companies like Instagram and Facebook find ways to purposely make their sites and apps almost addicting. There is value in creating a platform that people can’t step away from, although this benefits companies, it can hurt users. The importance of attention is relevant to combating the loss of focus in society. Since social media is quick and easy, both highly attractive qualities when connecting to the world, it will be apart of our society until the next new invention. There are also features that can make social media so addicting that is becomes problematic to our attention spans.
All in all, if people’s attention spans continue to shorten, our futures will be paying the price. A dark age is Maggie Jackson’s explanation for this issue, which she explains in her book “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.” She is able to push and pull at this idea of “eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention” (Jackson, 13). She raises the point of several underlying distractors and what they could be doing to our society. Jackson describes attention as necessary to intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress, and without it there may be great toll on humanity. This new age brings forth “social diffusion, intellectual fragmentation, sensory detachment,” and the addiction to multitask people and things (Jackson, 13). In our withdrawal from time, space, and human interaction, society could be stuck, without moving forward or making progress. Our ability to stay focused, to learn and understand, and to develop could soon become shaped by our distractions. Social media and the vast expansion of information online might just pull our society into this “dark age.”