filamentosmovimentos

"the contemporary crisis of attentiveness has been partly ‘elaborated in terms of the impact of Internet usage on the cognitive architecture of a neuroplastic and mimetic social brain’, exploring the ways in which our engagements with new media might constitute ‘a rewiring of attention’ via activities such as ‘multi-tasking and reading hyperlinked texts’.

One example of this is the work of Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book "The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think" in which he argues that our use of the Internet involves using our brains in ways that exercise ‘the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply'. (Of course, by that logic, since I read Carr’s own text on the internet, that must mean that I did so inattentively). The Internet, Carr suggests, is ‘an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it… The penalty is amplified by what brain scientists call switching costs. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources’ (Carr, 2010a: 1).
As a culture we are remaking the neurology of our attention capacity in a manner that will ultimately normalize a superficial, distracted engagement with the world rather than a deep, profound one. While Carr does acknowledge that ‘the ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively’ – and hence that the Internet has not had a purely negative impact on the nature of our thinking – he does argue that ‘skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis'."

in Laura Cull's essay: "on Attention"