The Fight Against Early Millennial Extinction

A developing, but increasingly popular debate today deals with how the Internet, with its seemingly immeasurable degree of information, affects the minds of the young people who depend on it. While another popular debate about kids using electronic devices – which the NY Times hosted an online discussion about only yesterday –concludes that scaling back the use of is ultimately beneficial for a child, the one I’m interested in doesn’t have such a clear answer. The biggest reason for this is that, for all its diversion and superfluity, the Internet has quickly become our generation’s most valuable tool for finding information, whereas most electronic devices don’t carry such value.

An article I read last May in New York Magazine called “The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation” provided perhaps the most extensive investigation into this issue to date. With greater panache than I will ever have, author Sam Anderson takes a deep look into the many problems plaguing us so-called Millennials: our inability to focus on and complete tasks from start to finish; our relatively weak tolerance for distraction; and our desire to remedy these problems by “doping” our minds into focus (my college audience shouldn’t have any trouble comprehending this).

In spite of all these hurdles impeding our ability to truly focus (if we even can), Anderson concludes that we will emerge with a unique ability to multitask and bring disparate pieces of information together to create something original. Here’s a little summary: “More than any other organ, the brain is designed to change based on experience, a feature called neuroplasticity. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task [David] Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly.”

While I don’t doubt that our brains are adapting to meet the ever-changing needs of an ever-abundant Internet, I do doubt that this change is necessarily good for everyone. All it really means is that those with an inherent ability to multitask will benefit while those with less natural ability will struggle to keep up. Obviously this is all part of the Darwinian¹ selection process, but it also raises a number of interesting questions about what implications it may have. Chief among these questions, I think, is whether or not some of us are sacrificing our “natural” talents in favor of Internet-related skills that society tells us we should be good at.

Now, as a senior getting ready to graduate I recognize my own subjectivity and stake in what I’m about to say (especially making it on a blog). Yet I can’t help but notice how employers, particularly media employers, look for an increasingly varied skill set: HTML coding, proficiency in Adobe programs, proficiency in Microsoft programs, knowledge of social media/networking sites, or plain Internet “savvy,” just to name a few. I understand that having a diverse range of skills is helpful in today’s occupational environment, but I also think cursory knowledge of many skills leads to less than expert knowledge of any one skill.

I know that many people are multi-talented and can learn to be proficiently skilled at more than one thing. I also know that people can adapt their talents to the requirements of the online culture. What I’m really arguing is that everyone who has talent is not necessarily talented at more than one thing, and pushing that person to try may only inhibit his or her ability to pursue that one thing.

The Internet culture we’ve become so accustomed to I believe has forced us into the mindset that we are losing if we can’t do everything, and that we are stupid if we don’t know everything. It seems devoting real attention to one aspect of our lives is often an effort in futility, with everything else we may be missing out on. Recently I read that, due to the acceleration of the media, the amount of information up until 1940 equals the amount of information since 1940.² While this wasn’t the first time I came across this statistic, it was the first time I thought about what it actually means for our cultural psyche. I thought about the competitive, almost ruthless nature with which we, as self-respecting cultural citizens, are expected to digest this galaxy of information. We expect that because access to this information has increased, we should all know more. Yet we can’t possibly make ourselves know more. We can know about a lot more things, but the more things we know about, the less we know about each of them, which gets to the heart of the problem with our new information age. We simply know less about more.

I suppose this might not be a problem that I have with culture (who am I to argue for or against a trend?) but more of a problem that culture has with me. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the type of person who likes to load my plate with thousands of different stimuli. Whereas many of my peers listen to music or watch TV while doing work, I typically have no such distractions. Whereas the average person in my generation has 8 tabs open in his or her Internet browser, I rarely have more than 4 and even become anxious when I have more because I think I forgot to do something or left it there for a reason (self-diagnosed “browser-tab anxiety”). Yet I am the type of person who likes to think through almost everything I encounter, who won’t stop until I understand something to its absolute core, and who lays awake at night thinking about concepts like “post-irony” until I can wrap my head around them.

Does this mean I’m dying breed? Well, not exactly. I used to lament the fact that I wasn’t born 100 years ago, where everything seemed so much simpler and I wouldn’t have had to worry about these types of problems. But I now realize that it’s people like me who are forming the impending, nascent backlash against such lofty ideals as “cultural globalization,” where people adopt universal and/or random ideas into the way they act because there’s simply nothing new. We form the link from new age eclecticism back to specialization and individuality. We will usher in a new era where people will no longer attend to 30-second sound bites and 500 word blog posts in favor of depth that requires a greater and more nuanced attention span.

So yes, my societal value may be down for now, but as we all know history moves in cycles. I’m no dinosaur; I just hope I subsist long enough to witness my revival.

¹I am loath to say “natural selection” due to the fact that we are talking about something so diametrically opposed to nature in the Internet.
²I also read this in a book published over 20 years ago, which means that, due to the advent of the Internet, the latter has now probably far surpassed the former.