During an idle 30 minutes or so the other day, I participated in one of those stupid Facebook applications wherein you announce to all and sundry what your favourite albums/films/books are. In this case, I chose books. I felt a brief pang of guilt afterwards realizing that all of my selections were books I’d read 5-15 years ago. Truly, my prime time for devouring books is over. At least for now. But I still find myself reading more than ever – oftentimes off the Internet. There was an article in Atlantic Monthly a while back called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It was more sensational than informative, but it’s worth a read. It’s also worthwhile pondering whether our attention spans are shrinking to the point of idiocy anywhere outside of university and college. Or maybe even including university and college.

It takes a long span of attention to get through The Brothers Karamazov. Even a shorter work (and one of my Facebook selections) such as To the Lighthouse, requires a qualitatively different kind of concentration from, say, a perusal of the Globe and Mail, CNN online, or your favourite blog. And it’s the kind of attention that recently I have been unable to give. For that kind of attention, I need two to four weeks of relative inactivity. A long holiday. A period of unemployment. Or I need an academic setting that requires you to give that kind of attention.

I can feel my brain changing during these long periods of time when I’m too busy to read properly. I become geared for efficiency and function. That’s alright in its place, but it does impede creative and critical faculties.

Perhaps this is the point of the consumer society we live in. To burden each person with so much work and so much media distraction, that we can neither discern the big problems that plague us, nor imagine a world that is radically different.

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