Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains

From TFA:

Wired.com: The subtitle of your book predicts a "coming dark age." Do you really believe this?

Jackson: Dark ages are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering.

The translation:

Wired.com: The subtitle of your book predicts a "coming dark age." Do you really believe this?

Jackson: Of course not. But I was hoping to sell more books that way.

I sit here at 2:30AM with my hand on my head staring at the screen wondering why the hell I'm not sleeping when my eyes find the title of this post "Digital Overload is Frying Our Brains". Yes indeed. Exactly what I was feeling!

Are we Information Junkies getting hooked on ingesting new information as fast as it comes at us? If, as the article says, we are programmed to be interrupted, how does a constant flow of interruptions effect our ability to grow as individuals, form individual opinions, and be creative? How important is all this information anyway?

FTA:

We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrenalin jolt when orienting to new stimuli: Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. So in this very fast-paced world, it's easy and tempting to always react to the new thing. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimize our capacity to pursue goals.

And there are now entire businesses -- social news sites, Twitter, Facebook -- that can deliver a never-ending stream of fresh interrupts to the click-addicted. Distraction dealers. Impatience pushers.