I heard about this book from a forum that I read and thought it sounded interesting so I picked it up. Carr goes through history explaining some of the great thinkers while also explaining the development of the computer and the Internet. He does say that our attention spans in general have decreased because we are so used to skimming articles for content and clicking between tabs (Quick: how many tabs do you have open right now? I have 15 including the one being used to write this post). He states that we jump from item to item never focusing on one task long enough to be able to make sufficient progress on it. He also states that the Internet makes it harder to focus on books because of the lack of interactivity. I did find the studies about interactivity with text and comprehension of the text interesting (apparently people do worse comprehending an article with hyperlinks than they do comprehending a plain text article because they keep clicking around.
However, I was not happy that there was no real solution given in this book for the problem of decreased attention spans due to the Internet (besides avoiding it altogether--which is not really possible in today's society). I wish he would have provided ways to work around the problem.
Rating 3/5
Sounds like an interesting book except for the fact he had no solutions. What's the point. I'll admit I do get distracted while online. However, it hasn't affected my attention span when it comes to reading. No problem there. :)
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