The other day, I read this article which discussed distraction. It is a little lengthy but it is a good read. At the beginning of the article, the author asks the reader to get rid of all his or her distractions: Twitter, texts, email in-boxes, checking sports scores, etc. I did my best to do so, but I didn't successfully read through the whole thing without looking up a few things he mentioned in the article.
The author discusses how the problem of attention has been brought to the center of our culture's attention, and how attention and distraction has been the focus of many studies. It seems that most of the studies say that the detractions that we have are a negative thing: they hurt productivity and waste time. The author wonders if wasted time is actually wasted or not. Isn't jumping from site to site just following your attention? While I was reading the article, the author mentioned some things that distracted him from writing the article. A few of those things caught my attention and I looked them up, then I returned to reading the article. It didn't distract me enough to stop reading the article completely, but now I know more about the things he mentioned.
There are a lot of people who think that the lack of attention of younger generations will lead to them lacking skills like concentrating on complex tasks from beginning to end, but the author makes an interesting point: they can already do things that their elders can't—like conducting numerous conversations simultaneously across different mediums, or being able to pay attention when switching between attentional targets in a way that has been thought impossible. Is this a bad thing? Time will tell if this leads to a state of ineptness or to a new way of thinking and doing things.
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