Virtual Obesity

For the past few days I've been on a kind of digital sabbatical. That is, I've taken a break from obsessively checking and re-checking newsfeeds, Twitters, blogs, Facebook, and Wikipedia trawling. Not only was it interrupting my work pattern, it's effects remained even after I'd left the computer. So I switched off and went to the library, which, for those who haven't been lately, is a large wi-fi hub with book shelves for decoration. I was often the only one actually reading a book.

Not that I'm suggesting these people weren't working. I'm sure they were, and often with a greater attentiveness that myself. Although a lot were Facebook-ing. Even without a computer nearby, I found I had to stand up and walk around at least once an hour. If I wasn't careful I'd start picking out books at random and start flicking through them, i.e. trawling the internet. The fact is that after a lifetime saturated in television, computer games and now the internet, my attention span is one of the shortest  I know of. I can't watch a movie without fidgeting. I didn't need a detox from technology, the problem was entirely my own. It was as I flicked through a book on Oriental Textiles that I realised my brain was overweight; that my thinking was obese.

The food analogy was effective, which is to say terrifying. I was snacking on something at least every fifteen minutes, if not every five - sometimes every two. I considered quality irrelevant. It may have been a news report, but if it wasn't related to my work, which it never was, it counted as a distraction - as a Chicken McNugget of brain junk. Nicholas Carr, in his excellent book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, discusses how using the internet changes the fundamental way in which our brain functions. Using the internet is not the same as reading. For instance our eyes don't move in the same way; instead of moving left to right, they're moving in all directions and at a much higher speed. Our brains are processing a larger of amount of information and greater speeds. My quandry is this: no matter how educational it may be, if it's served to us amongst a million blinking links, videos, advertisement, comment boxes and memes, are we really taking it in, or is it the informational equivalent of a Double Down?