Yes, I'm checking my email and eating lunch while I write this post

I was just going through Arts & Letters Daily and read this article, "In Defense of Distraction" by Sam Anderson, from New York magazine, which you can find here. It's really interesting - and, in its postmodern way, an in-depth piece of writing about not doing things in depth. Well, sort of. Anyway, it's refreshing in that the author neither laments that we're all getting stupid because of the Internet, nor proposes that we should all get with the program and Twitter already. (Never!) An annoying example of the latter: I recently attended the presentation of an e-book by its developers at the publishing company, and they were all talking about the "latest research" that showed students don't like to read entire books or even chapters. So, you know, maybe the professors could put in electronic pointers telling the students what's the most useful in the book. Okay, maybe this will sound like an angry old woman, but um...that's called taking notes. Deciding what information is important is part of learning. In my humble opinion.

Which leads nicely into the following paragraph from the article (mostly a quotation), which I found particularly interesting:

Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”