Psychotherapist Michael Hausauer notes, teens have a, "terrific interest in knowing what's going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop." In, The Jugglers Brain, one of the premises of rhetoric and attention is that the Internet commands our attention just to scatter it. This takes away depth and creativity. But, will the internet stop growing anytime soon? The answer seems to be no, but to improve something always comes at the cost of another. While reading, The Jugglers Brain, on my laptop, I was focused but the constant notifications of texts or social media made me lose my focus.
When reading I was thinking of all the ways how the Internet scatters my attention while it is doing it right before my eyes. Before I realize I'm checking my Facebook then the ads on the side of Facebook, much like these ads in this blog. Our attention is scattered so easily because digital technology produces an abundance of information. Looking at a simple home page of an email account, you have news stories, accounts to sign up for, ads for things to win. The amount of information on the web is unprecedented and it demands our attention.
This then creates a competition of attention. We can't focus of everything on our Facebook page all at once. When it comes to messages, events, notifications, and friend requests we can’t focus on all that at one time. We are in this world what we attend to. When we are going through our Twitter feed weather we click on a political news story or a humorous video we are creating our ideals and beliefs. The internet is changing the way we think and process information. I hope you were distracted by these ads in my blog as the internet forces us to be distracted through social media and advertisements like these.
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