All About Content

“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.”

According to the current issue of The Atlantic, the Web

…injects the mediumā€™s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as weā€™re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaperā€™s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

Jumping Brain image by Emilio Garcia

The author laments that he’s finding it increasingly difficult to read books or anything of substantive length — it’s just too hard to concentrate. As someone who used to read voraciously but now loses patience with anything longer than a thousand words, I sympathize.

The more time we spend on the web, the more it changes the way we process information… the Internet is remaking our brains in its image. Resistance appears to be futile.

Read the article (yep, the whole thing… as in all 4173 words, with only a few hyperlinks and a couple of dropcaps to distract you from all that endless type.)