One thing at a time

I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I'm reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article.... That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.
--Nicholas Carr. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, 2010.

Nicholas Carr has to stop reading and check email. The more he does it, the more he needs to do it. Nicholas Carr has studied the way our brains change, and he's worried. His detractors say he's an old coot, a dinosaur who doesn't want to adapt. But I think he's nostalgic. He longs for quieter, slower times, when we read Susan Sontag, Ralph Ellison, or Frantz Fanon in paper books we could underline in pencil, when we understood the tools of our work and play. Books. Conversations face to face. Chalk and blackboard. LAN lines, corded phones with no static and cutting out.

The old things were comprehensible. Now we have unanswerable questions. Is the Nook app for the iPad 3 a better choice than a Kindle? How does the latest Android compare with iPhone 4? Is my software limiting my creativity? Did I "Like" that comment from a friend of my daughter who said something generous on Facebook about that old picture of the two of us? Better go back and check, and while I'm there, better read the link my former student posted about Sudanese women.

Carr writes, "Google's profits are tied directly to the velocity of people's information intake. The faster we surf across the surface of the web--the more links we click and pages we view--the more opportunities Google gains to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.... The last thing the company wants is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction" (156).

I can't listen to music and talk at the same time. When I multitask, my breath gets shallow, my neck goes into a cramp, I sweat, a panic builds and I feel my brain will explode. Not everything deserves my full, focused attention. But I don't know how to give partial attention. I love the simplicity of one thing at a time. I crave it. And I have trouble sorting, prioritizing, and deciding what to pay attention to.

The young don't know this anxiety. Their brains are wired a new way. What I regard as superficial seems to them perfectly adequate to sustain connection. They know Facebook doesn't deserve full attention. They can breathe perfectly well while while engaging in Google chat with two people and Facebook chat with another while at the same time talking on the phone and reading a news website. They enjoy it. It feels functional to them. My notion of "depth" is their notion of Too Much Information.

I yearn for simplicity. One thing at a time. But I have a feeling this yearning is old-fashioned, out-dated, out of sync with the time. I walked for an hour in the forest, in the pouring rain, paying attention to one thing at a time while inundated by the touch, smell, and sound of rain, taking pictures till my glasses fogged and my fingers stiffened with cold. Slideshow of the forest available here.