Stumble Stumble

The internet, stumbleupon to be precise, is thoroughly chopping up my attention span. It's true, I'm becoming less patient, less attentive to deep substantive arguments in favor of the lighter evanescent points.

I had two teachers who argued over this point, the internet and literacy. My English teacher warned that we would lose our ability to think deeply, that the experience of sitting down to absorb a novel's worth of information would be gone some day. My history teacher argued that the internet has provided tools and incentives for increasing literacy and writing all over the world, albeit in an abbreviated fashion.

The language of the internet is increasingly market-driven. Not necessarily driven by profit, but more and more driven by the tendency to grab attention through provocative wording, images, audio, video and all imagery. The inundation of information is increasing in breadth and decreasing in depth. Only the best, the brightest, weirdest, sexiest, fastest items - name a superlative - only these are meant to get one's attention, and they only grab you for an instant before they're replaced by more bubble gum and candy the next day, the next hour, the next minute.

Refresh your page and forget entirely the article you were just reading. It was an important, life-changing site about eliminating climate change, or poverty, or sexism, but suddenly I now care only about those awesome natural tits. But I don't take the time even to enjoy the breasts because I want to see if there's an addictive flash game I've never seen. But I don't finish the first level because it's too hard, and I want to read about politics. But I don't read the news because I don't care about FISA, and I know I should be better informed and I think about looking up the issue on wikipedia but I don't give it the time because I want to see a video of laughing babies, or one with a montage of amazing near-death incidents.

Sometimes I play online checkers just to keep my head from spinning. But I'll keep moving around until there are no more stumbles, in which case I'll cycle through my familiar sites until I think of something better to do.

Here I am, if you were wondering. I'm at the part of a cycle where I try to purge my mind of the spinning.