Just how much is the internet impacting you?

The internet, a great tool, but a tool that involves many paradoxes. The internet not only seizes our attention but also scatters it.

We focus intensively on the net, the medium itself, the flickering screen in front of our eyes, but we are easily distracted by the medium’s constant barrage of competing messages and stimuli. Wherever and whenever we log on, the internet presents itself as an incredibly seductive blur. 

Swedish neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg refers to human beings as ‘wanting more information, more impressions and more complexity’, and as a result, people tend to ‘seek out situations that demand concurrent performance or situations in which we are overwhelmed with information’.

If the slow progression of words across printed pages dampened our cravings to be inundated by mental stimulation, the internet indulges it. 

It returns us to our native state of bottom-up distractedness while presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever dealt with. As Alberto Villoldo detailed in his book ‘One Spirit Medicine’ we are exposed to more stimuli in one week, than our ancestors were in their entire lifetime!

So if you are ever feeling drained, a little burned out or experiencing fully fledged depression, please remember that we did not evolve to consume this much stimulation.

Research continues to show that people who read linear text are able to comprehend more, remember more and therefore ultimately learn more than those who are bombarded with links.

In a 2001 study, two Canada based scholars asked 70 people to read a short story by Modernist writer Elizabeth Bowen — ‘The Demon Lover’. One group were asked to read the story in a traditional linear-text format. The second group were given a version comprised of links to read, as you would find on a normal web page.

Not only did the hypertext readers take longer to read the story, but in the interviews that followed the testing, it was reported they showed more confusion and uncertainty about what they had just read.

Whilst we may feel we are learning more, we can actually be overloading our working memory with too much stimulation, resulting in a much shallower retention. 

We love to feel connected and we hate to feel disconnected. The internet doesn’t change our intellectual habits against our will, but it changes them nevertheless.