Should We Ration Our Online Time, For Sanity's Sake?

[Donk]

This article in the Guardian made me stop and think. This paragraph in particular:

 

My attention span was never great, but modern technology has halved it, and halved it again, and again and again, down to an atomic level, and now there's nothing discernible left. Back in that room, bombarded by alerts and emails, repeatedly tapping search terms into Google Instant for no good reason, playing mindless pinball with words and images, tumbling down countless little attention-vortexes, plunging into one split-second coma after another, I began to feel I was neither in control nor 100% physically present. I wasn't using the computer. The computer was using me – to keep its keys warm. (Apart from "enter", obviously. I didn't even have to press that.)

I'm starting to show a lot of the same symptoms. Faced with a long online article, I'll read part of the way down it. Then check my mailbox. Maybe browse a forum or two. Read a bit more of the article... a piece that I used to read in a single slurp can now take me over an hour. :shocked:

 

I googled for some more information about attention span problems. One of the sites I found was http://shortattentionspan.net/ ... but the pages loaded so slowly that I gave up on it

[Tormod]

I know. It's hard to keep up with everything. And it's a sad fact that most of it is so...unimportant. Hang on, gotta check my fax machine... :P