Attention Crisis

For once, I read a positive article about my generation from a back issue of New York Magazine (dated May 25th, 2009). Titled, "The Benefits of Distraction," and written by Sam Anderson, I highly recommend that you take a look at his argument. It's an idea that has been addressed by many bloggers, many of my professors, and it's even a joke tossed around between me and my friends: that, "with the Internet and all," things are becoming vastly different, probably for the worse. My generation is lazy, unable to concentrate, and vastly unintelligent because of it. I have to admit, while reading the article I was trying to absorb the new Grizzly Bear album "Veckatimest" and searching the Internet for a film to see tomorrow night. Earlier today, I vaguely watched a movie (granted, it was one I had seen many times before) while cleaning my room. I also spent half of the day texting: texting while I did my laundry, texting while I ate lunch, texting while I went grocery shopping. Often, my computer is the last thing I touch before I go to sleep and the first thing I reach for when I wake up in the morning.
For the first time in a long time, I followed an article to its continuation instead of putting it in the back of my mind to finish later. Anderson approaches the topic with a great sense of humor, making his own list of the distractions which befell him while he wrote the article, from outside noises to YouTube videos. He touches on the prescription drug overload and interviews an expert multitasker (David Meyer) who had just returned from a conference on attention with the Dalai Lama. The article frequently returns to Buddhism and it's opposite-spectrum focus on attention discipline. Winifred Gallagher, author of the book "Rapt" (which I'm now eager to read) also talks about the benefits of such a discipline, and the positive effect it can have on everyone's life- as Anderson comments (without a source....) "Some psychologists predict that we'll all do daily 20-30 minute 'secular attentional workouts.'" Thank god I got my yoga in today.
I was happy to find that, despite the often fear-mongering opinions of other commentators on the effect of technology, Anderson makes the point that while future generations might be lacking in certain types of intelligence, they also "might have an associative genius we don't." The rapid change of our way of life is often scary, but isn't that always the way it works? Past generations have always balked at strange new phenomenons, like teenagers spending too much time on the telephone, in front of the television, listening to loud music. And while I can't say for sure that we're turning into the best, the brightest, or the most hard-working generation, just like all others before us, we're adapting. And I'm sure by the time we're grown, they'll be yet another technological fad to scare us.


Also- even if you don't have time to read the whole article, make sure to check out Anderson's highly recommended distraction- a Wikipedia entry on the Boston Molasses Disaster. His response: "The world is a stranger place than we will ever know," and I can't agree more.