I see this claim every day. Serious question, has anyone made sure it's true? It's like, speak for your fucking self New York Times. I probably read ten or fifteen thousand words a day, maybe more, a good bit of it in hard print. So do all of the most interesting people I know. This doesn't even make sense to me. If I'm reading and I get a text, I answer the text and go back to reading. What do other people do?It’s no accident that the click-happy online universe can sap our focus and make it harder for us to read a full-length book with rapt attention.
What I've found is when I do finish a book and I do not dive directly into the next one, my consumption of media on the Internet tends to widen the length of time I spend between books. This has led me to essentially read in spurts, where I'll devour 3-5 books in a quick span and then "catch up" on all the media I've been missing on the Internet. This is in sharp contrast to my younger days when all I would do is read, and I do find myself missing the time when I didn't feel the urge to know what is happening on the internet at all times, i.e. "missing out on pop culture." I've been working on diminishing that though, the internet will never replace books for me.
This absolutely happens to me as well, though the media I consume online is probably 98% written word (excluding music, which I also devoured as a youth and continue to). I don't read less as a result, -just fewer books and more short-form. I do believe the quality of what I read overall has declined significantly, although to be fair, I could go months reading books years ago before finding one that was transformative and blew me away. I may be looking back with rose tinted glasses to some degree.
There are different views on the attention span thing. A quick google search turned up The Gaurdian: mixed results on attention span from March 2013 and The Gaurdian again, Definitely reduced attention span from March 2012 I googled "does the internet affect attention span" A link to the results On the other question, if I'm sitting, enjoying a good book, I will either respond quickly, ignore the text, or just not hear my phone go off, and I'm generally none the worse.
Haha, I could have done some googling I guess, but I didn't, because what I actually meant was "I think these sorts of articles are generalizing, assumption-making crocks of shit." Fact is, we don't know yet whether the internet is messing with our attention spans. And what if we're misunderstanding the causes? I was trying to watch the BCS football thing on tv but it bored me and the article on my laptop was extremely interesting -- so now I'm sitting on my laptop reading instead of watching football. Did the internet evilly steal my attention? I give my attention to the most interesting thing in my vicinity and always will, no matter where it comes from. That's just human.
Long-form reading might just be the last thing the Internet helped us filter. People would sit through a long, dull book in the 1950s because there wasn't much else to do. Why suffer through that when someone's written this 15,000 word account of their life in a dictatorship?