Look, something shiny!
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
So my birthday is coming up and I’m faced with the ultimate annual question: What do you want?
Knowing it was coming, I started to make a list last month. My list is far from complete, and I’m not even how happy I am with it. My problem is that I think of something I’d like, but I’m driving or busy and don’t have time to add it to the list. Then, when I do have time, I have completely forgotten what it was. I can only remember that there was something, and it was good. But I do have a list and as I looked it over, I noticed something. In the past, my lists, whether birthday, Christmas, Arbor Day, whatever, have always had a nice selection of books to it. The past few years, however, I have included fewer and fewer books. This is due to the fact that I am now reading far less. Partly due to a lack of time, but mostly due to a lack of something I’m sorely missing: Attention span.
I’ve always been a bit ADD, in elementary school and junior high I took some medicine for it, but through high school and college I really didn’t feel like I needed it. Lately, however I’ve been noticing that I’m having trouble following long trails of thought or reading long articles or books. I’ve had a theory that this was due to the fact that I spend more than eight hours a day staring at a computer, where my attention is generally spread between three or four things. Even as I write this, I have an IM conversation going, four email accounts that are constantly popping in and a movie (on pause). I am able to keep up with all of these things just fine (or so I tell myself), but when I’m not on a computer, things just move too slow for me, and when they move too slow, I lose interest. Thus, the lack of reading. There’s really nothing I liked more growing up than immersing myself in a nice long book. I did so often and quite quickly. A four hundred page book in a matter of days was nothing for me. The higher the reading level, the greater the challenge. Today, I can’t get a page or two without losing focus. Shoot, sometimes I can’t even get through a sentence without having to re-read it two or three times. Not because I don’t understand it, but because somewhere in between the words, my mind wandered. I’ve been trying to read through the Bible in a year, by reading just a few hours a week. I have been unable to keep any kind of schedule, or even keep track of what I’m reading beyond a few verses. I hadn’t mentioned this theory of the computer ruining my life before, but I read an article today that broached this exact subject. The article is four pages long, and I read the entire thing, though I did have to stop and focus on something else a few times. I’m not going to go into detail on the article as I hope you will take the time to read it for yourself, but I will say that his findings are quite congruent with my own experiences.
If this is true, if my mind has truly been altered by a constant flood of distractions and blinking lights, what can I do to fix it? The quick and easy answer: get off the computer. I’m not saying I need to become a Luddite or anything, but I do need to check my email and surf the web far less often. Ok, that seems easy, but there is an inherent problem that most of us face. We have jobs that require us to sit all day. That’s a big issue for me right now, and not one I have an answer to. There are other issues to sitting in front of this box as well, my eyes are strained (yes, I have an LCD monitor), my body is lethargic and I’m terribly out of shape, and I rely on things like spellcheck and Google far too much for even basic things. I have chosen, or should say, found myself in a career that is focused solely on not only the computer, but the internet in general. While I don’t feel like I’m part of the problem or what I do is wrong for these reasons, I do feel that sitting here, in a chair in front of two large monitors less than two feet from my face for eight, soon to be ten, hours a day, is detrimental to my well-being. Again, I have no answer to this issue. I am not qualified to do anything other than this without getting a Master’s Degree to teach with. I don’t have enough money to take a leave of absence or sabbatical. So until a solution presents itself, I will be here, fighting the urge to Twitter my every move, which, to me, is just giving in fully to this machine.
Ironically, this may be my longest blog post ever.
