Internet buzzkills

For quite a while now, I’ve been hearing outbursts from IU students making one particular argument that I’ve felt amounted to little more than sensory judgment. \nThe argument is easy to identify by its high ratio of name-checked cultural fad terms to actual argumentative content, and by its inevitable brevity, as it’s hard to say a whole lot about something you haven’t thought out past your instincts. \nIt sounds something like this: “These days, it’s like, everyone’s logging onto MySpace, Generation Y needs constant stimulation, everyone’s taking Adderall and people just want to read about Paris Hilton.” \nMaybe “argument” is a loose word for what’s going on in this hipster trend buzz talk. But what people who babble on in this way are getting at is this: The more omnipresent the media becomes in our lives, the shorter our attention spans are and the more shallow we get in our thought processes. \nA particularly good counterexample to this showed up in the New York Times last week. The Times ran an article about findings by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that said 61 percent of Americans with a broadband internet connection had been to the library in the past year whereas only 39 percent of Americans without one had. Furthermore, 18- to 30-year-olds were the age group that visited libraries most often. \nCorrelation isn’t causation, but one feasible explanation for this is that, contrary to the panicked trend-talkers, the “information superhighway” isn’t giving us all we want so fast that it’s shrinking our attention spans to a length too short to get out of our computer chairs. Rather, it’s providing us with a place to gather more information than we ever could before and therefore allowing us to develop a wider collection of interests in what we now know is out there – and a greater amount of information about those interests. \nAnother explanation might be that the Internet generates a greater interest in reading generally. With the Internet, it’s free and easy to read multiple major newspapers as well as find a wide variety of alternative news sources that individuals find more appealing than anything they could have found locally on paper, making them want to read when they wouldn’t have done so at all otherwise. And blogs, of course, lead people to read up on all kinds of opinions they wouldn’t have known about otherwise. \nIn any case, this relationship between books and the Internet shows that the time we spend in front of our computers not only doesn’t appear to be leading us further down the path of becoming hedonistic automatons, it actually seems to make us more interested and passionate about intellectual pursuits.