To: Martin

This started as a response to Martin's post, but I decided to give it its own space:

One of my greatest pleasures as a constant consumer of media (ick) is when I'm reading a book that is still pretty fresh and I get the tickle in my brain tell me that I'm reading something outdated.

Working at Staples this past holiday season, we had so many people come in for Kindles that we sold out of them every two days. I'm not sure what happened all of a sudden, but it was like a switch was flicked in people's brains. Suddenly, instead of only nerds and travelers, just about everyone who came in was frothing at the mouth for them and in many cases, they barely knew how it worked.. just that they needed one.

More digital books than real books were sold this last quarter. Fuck.

I think we will/should keep them both around. They've got great battery life, but analog backups are pretty important.

The unbundling of albums only really matters to prog. musicians; albums were collections of singles before the Beatles. I dig Martin's point about television/movies; there's no way that people are actively watching clips INSTEAD of consuming the main show. It looks to me like a double dip for advertisers much more than a problem for them.

I am distracted by the outside world at a level that smashes the distraction I feel when I'm at a computer. I'm not sure if this is an argument for or against Carr's point (for, I think, actually?) but I have ADHD and one of my favorite things is this table of test scores I have from my psychologist that contrasts my level of proficiency at doing a task in silence (or with smooth jazz playing, he's a cool guy) versus when a tape of a city is playing (quietly, really) in the background with all the hustle and bustle, cars, conversations, etc. It's a comical drop in performance. When I'm at a computer, I am actually a lot more task oriented than I am when I'm OFF the computer. I DO stop and check my Facebook and my email and the news and whatever, but mostly when I am NOT on the computer and I'm obsessively doing it on my phone. On the machine, I do those things first and then I get to doing the thing I'm doing.

Of course, this is only if we're talking about school work (or typing in this box, that's all I've been doing for some time now..); if I am doing something more leisurely I will likely have 34978 things happening at once, but so what? If I want to read an article, I read it from the top to the bottom; if I want to skim it, I skim it; if I'm editing a video, I lose track of time and the only other thing I will have going on is iTunes until I'm working on the audio and I turn it off. If I can either deep focus on the work OR multitask myself into inefficiency and shallow focus, it sounds to me like I've picked up a sweet new skill of shallow focus over my ancestors instead of losing deep focus.

I do find it hard to pay attention to reading a book when there is something else going on, but isn't that normal? He talks a lot about libraries at one point... they are quiet for a reason. They were quiet before the internet happened. If it didn't matter if there were other things going on while someone was trying to deep focus, then that would never have mattered. The distractions are different, perhaps, but I don't see why my experience of them should have been altered.