Your Brain on 140 Characters

By the time you finish reading this sentence, you could be halfway through a Vine.

Maybe you prefer the written word. If so, you’ve just passed the length of a full tweet.

Don’t get too comfortable with brevity: this column, which aims to fill up as much of your time as roughly 30 tweets, is about the danger of short attention spans, particularly on the Internet. For that reason, I need to make a self-conscious appeal before mounting my sermonizing pulpit.

To the reader: please commit either to reading—really reading—the entirety of this article or else to ducking out now, no hard feelings. Right hand or left hand: there is no middle option.

I’ll wait until the shuffling subsides.

Now back to business. As the examples of Vine and Twitter illustrate, the Internet has shrunk the attention span of the modern world. From numbered lists to short videos, we rely on bite-sized content. We are a generation of skimmers, and this is a problem.

There’s no reason to pick on Vine and Twitter exclusively. Very few mass websites require users to focus on one piece of content for more than a few glances. If you spend an hour pouring over a BuzzFeed list, then you are wasting your close-reading talents on the wrong piece. Likewise, scrolling through Facebook allows you to read through dozens of statuses in a matter of moments.

On the Internet, time is measured in seconds, and if you don’t believe me, experiment by watching a long YouTube ad when you have the option of skipping. Unless you are particularly interested in T-Mobile’s family plan, I predict a physically painful experience.

Science substantiates this observation of impatience. In 2006, Nielson Norman Group discovered that humans read articles online very differently than how they read them in physical form. Rather than going line by line, web users consume in an F-shaped pattern: read over the first line, scan over the next several, and pick up again when they find a key buzzword. If we don’t catch what we want at a glance, we close the tab and turn our attention elsewhere.

One explanation for this habit could be structural. With tricky devices such as recommended articles on BuzzFeed and external links on Twitter, the Internet never lets us focus on one page for too long. We’re like three-year-olds in Toys “R” Us, eyes darting around because we’re overwhelmed by the number of toys.

The other half of the explanation for short attention spans could be internal—the monster is inside us. We cave into repetitive clicking because we are unwilling to pay conscious attention to whatever is on the screen in front of us.

Skimming is mindless, which is why traveling through the rabbit hole of recommended videos on YouTube feels so draining, especially in the moment when you close out the browser. Theoretically, exposure to so many different images and sounds should swell my brain. Instead, skimming from 1:34 to 2:41, and from video to video, leaves me with a feeling of hollowness, like I haven’t learned anything at all.

Some might support the skimming lifestyle because of the perceived efficiency of the information that you’re receiving. As the theory goes, if a tweet can give you a news update in a few seconds, then why spend an extra minute reading an article on CNN that has the same information, just in a more grammatically palatable form?

This counter-argument misses the distinction between broad knowledge and deep knowledge. Breadth means watching two hours of Vine; depth means immersing yourself in a new movie.

By skewing towards breadth, the Internet accustoms us to getting what we want within seconds, and I worry that this shriveled attention span affects real-life relationships. If we discard an online article after a few glances, why not discard a new person after a brief conversation?

Now I’m no doctor—which are words you should always fear—but some prescriptions for the skimming condition seem pretty clear. Most generally, try an attitude shift. Before opening a link, consider whether you are willing to commit the amount of time necessary to truly engage with that content. Stop F-shaped reading.

For the video lover: Never, under any circumstances, skip ahead on the red bar. Pick a video that you’ll watch from start to finish, or don’t pick a video at all.

For the article lover: Read every word of every article that you pull up. If you open up 31 tabs, you better find a comfortable place to spend a few hours.

The Internet has infinite interesting material to offer, but unless you approach websites with mindful resolve, you’ll risk skimming through important information and, potentially, skimming through your life.

Don’t do it for the Vine; do it for yourself.

Sam Danello ’18 is a Crimson editorial writer living in Grays Hall.