February 22, 2002
2:56 PM   Subscribe

The Internet: breeding ground for goldfish-like attention spans.

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The Internet: breeding ground for goldfish-like attention spans.
posted by TiggleTaggleTiger (23 comments total)
 
I don't have time to read the whole article. Gimme a summary.
posted by ColdChef at 2:58 PM on February 22, 2002


sorry, what was the question again?
posted by hob at 2:58 PM on February 22, 2002


The web does something to people, err, and goldfish.
posted by kfury at 3:02 PM on February 22, 2002


Why read when you can watch eating competitions on FOX?!
posted by Hildago at 3:09 PM on February 22, 2002


Gotta feed the cat.
posted by liam at 3:11 PM on February 22, 2002


Has anyone heard the new Boards of Canada album? I'm liking it...
posted by TiggleTaggleTiger at 3:12 PM on February 22, 2002


I bet the guy who wrote that article never gets laid and gets /rooted by his fat overbearing older sister every day.
posted by Settle at 3:21 PM on February 22, 2002


I don't get it...what's so bad about having the attention-span of a goldfish...?

WOW! That dog has a puffy tail! (begin chasing puffy-tailed dog) Here, puff puff puff!
posted by davidmsc at 3:35 PM on February 22, 2002


i reckon that's about as stupid of an assertion as they come... what makes this guy such an expert on ... uh... cheese? i like cheese, that's enough for me.
posted by eatdonuts at 3:43 PM on February 22, 2002


Oh great, another "repeating the joke thread." Would it be possible for you people to just
posted by eyeballkid at 4:00 PM on February 22, 2002


I'll be the yutz who breaks the hilarity - I, unfortunately, have comic timing whatsoever and have a thought about this.

While my attention span may have shortened as a result of modern society (more than just the web), I think the counterbalancing gain is the ability to judge quite quickly which information is worth paying attention to. Haven't we all gotten very adept, for example, at distinguishing spam from e-mail?

It's true that the "habits of mind" encouraged by the Internet may lead to the atrophy of some skills, but I think they may well be offset by gains in others. I'm sure people were lamenting that people didn't practice committing oral tradition to memory anymore, post Gutenburg.
posted by Chanther at 4:22 PM on February 22, 2002


If I can just be serious for a minute... no wait, I forgot.

Seems like it's saying "If you don't pay attention to things enough, you eventually start having trouble doing it at all." True for the internet,along with everthing else.
posted by Yelling At Nothing at 5:21 PM on February 22, 2002


"A US expert reckons obsessive web browsing can cause attention spans to drop to as little as nine seconds - equivalent to a goldfish. Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things," says Ted Selker, a professor at MIT. "If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating," he told the BBC. "

That's as far as I got. So if the rest of the article said anything important could someone give me the condensed "cliff notes" version? I ain't got all day.
posted by ZachsMind at 5:44 PM on February 22, 2002


My favorite T-shirt:

I have attention
defecit disord...
Hey, what's that?
Can I play with it?
posted by jpoulos at 6:12 PM on February 22, 2002


Obviously the author doesn't account for community sites.
posted by riffola at 6:28 PM on February 22, 2002


This is the original BBC article, which is somewhat more detailed. But perhaps that's a defect...
posted by Gaz at 6:50 PM on February 22, 2002


The original article really seems to imply that it takes 9 seconds to figure out if a page is interesting or move on. Considering how much internet content is essentially boring, this is hardly surprising. It's not the same as being a goldfish.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 7:08 PM on February 22, 2002


It's true that the original article doesn't account for assertion as they come, considering how much I got. While I can be serious it's not the same as being possible for you to judge quite quickly which information is the guy who wrote that article.
posted by jeremias at 8:22 PM on February 22, 2002


i get distracted easily.
posted by kliuless at 7:23 AM on February 23, 2002


I'm reminded of this. Oh, and this. And not to overlook this.
posted by dhartung at 2:42 PM on February 23, 2002


Uh-huh.. Oh look, Dave! A helicopter!
posted by ZachsMind at 6:32 PM on February 23, 2002


where?
posted by AsiaInsider at 9:28 PM on February 23, 2002


It fails to take into account the relative complexities of goldfish and human brains. Humans have up to 10 to the power of 15 synapses, whilst goldfish are widely known to have just four. This means we can do a lot more thinking in nine seconds.
posted by walrus at 8:22 AM on February 26, 2002


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