The Kidnapping of Attention (Books Versus The Internet)

I know this is a shopworn topic from 25 years ago, but it's not that long ago. In terms of the age of our mammalian brain, 25 years is not even perceptible.

I've been thinking that internet reading is "listicle" reading, meaning you're interested in cutting to the chase of what you want to learn (or confirm) as bullet-point topics and you get swept along in that pursuit--rather than reading passages in books to augment that knowledge. Typically, people don't do it the other way around, where they buy or loan books to learn more about a topic they first discovered on the internet. The internet requires a separate interface, which I think is distracting in itself, because it is an entity in itself, designed for navigating through information by clicking and scrolling and sometimes surreptitiously leading the reader to places where they think you might like to go. (It's like the kidnapping of attention).

The internet is also its own echo chamber through hyperlinks: The internet doesn't link to a book unless you make the effort. But once you've gotten used to flying and getting somewhere in 90 minutes, you're not going to entertain the idea of spending 6 hours on a slow train. Interestingly, most of the knowledge I absorbed was from books I read on trains in the 1980s and early 90s commuting back and forth to work, prior to the internet.

I can't say that words in books are better than electronic text, but they exist in different mental models. The direction of the flow of information is the distinction between where words are first seen.

This blog entry was inspired by something I was reading in a paper book from the early 90s, then I started to research what was on the internet--which is more useful because both the book and the internet are read contemporaneously, as opposed to reading only what's on the internet because you don't have the book.

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[9/24/2024: Last night I was watching an interview with Gary Marcus about his new book, Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us, and he touched on “model collapse”which is now happening with the evolution of LLMs. Once text has been in the recycling process a few times you lose the original contexts, but it is essentially automatic Remix without proper curation. This is why it’s good to make paper books so it fixes it in an edition].