posted
David Brooks' Friday column in The Times is one of the most "awesome" columns that I have read by, I think, the most insightful columnist in The Times "bullpen":
If you’re like most of us, you’re wondering what the Internet is doing to your attention span. You toggle over to check your phone during even the smallest pause in real life. You feel those phantom vibrations even when no one is texting you. You have trouble concentrating for long periods.
Over the past few years researchers have done a lot of work on attention span, and how the brain is being re-sculpted by all those hours a day spent online. One of the conclusions that some of them are coming to is that the online life nurtures fluid intelligence and offline life is better at nurturing crystallizing intelligence.
Being online is like being a part of the greatest cocktail party ever and it is going on all the time. If you email, text, tweet, Facebook, Instagram or just follow Internet links you have access to an ever-changing universe of social touch-points. It’s like you’re circulating within an infinite throng, with instant access to people you’d almost never meet in real life
I admit it, how often have I been reading, or attempting to read, say, The Times, and I find myself being drawn by the Pied Piper of my Desktop upstairs in my office, or to my Galaxie S5 phone sitting atop a table in my Living Room?
Mr. Brooks really "sums it all up", and I wanted to share with the members who choose to review this Forum.
Posts: 9975 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
An additional Op-Ed appeared in The Times this past Monday regarding a good "attention building" activity in the Internet Age. Guess what; classical music:
For all the wonders of the web, it “threatens habits of deeper inquiry,” Ian Leslie argues in “Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It.” This book is among a growing number exploring what might be lost as we “lean on search engines and offload our memories to cloud storage,” to quote a review of four contributions to the topic last year by Jacob Silverman in The New York Times.
Among them, the one that seems most pertinent to my field, classical music, is Michael Harris’s “The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.” The book considers whether the Internet is eroding our attention spans. And you can’t listen to a 20-minute Haydn string quartet, let alone an 80-minute Mahler symphony, without having a pretty good attention span.
That live classical music requires concertgoers to listen and focus, often for lengthy stretches, has long seemed off-putting to many potential aficionados. I’m talking especially about orchestra and chamber ensemble programs. Though it’s interesting to watch performers in action, visual stimulation is not the point of a symphonic program. Opera, on the other hand, is theater. As with plays and musicals, operas have stories, characters, costumes and spectacle. Still, being confined midrow for a long one, even a classic like Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” demands considerable focus
While difficult for me to accept, the apparent relaxation of long standing house rules in any concert venue that there be no recording - audio and/or visual - of the performance, it appears to be relaxed at least in Carnegie Hall. I was astounded last month in Salzburg when for the applause following a performance of "Marriage of Figaro", somebody whipped out their phone and started to videograph.
Posts: 9975 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
