clipped from halfanhour.blogspot.com
> * Our attention span is naturally shortened if we spend our time hopping from item to item online.
First of all, the statement is counterfactual. Some people spend some of their time hopping from item to item online. Many people - including most academics - continue to read lengthier works, whether or not they are online. I can think of any number of book-length items I have posted in my newsletter. I read them, and from what I can judge, others read them as well.
Moreover, our online time is not simply spent reading items on the web. A significant amount of time is spent playing games or otherwise interacting. Think of the hours spent by people building things in Second Life, or forming clans in World or Warcraft. My own introduction to the online world was to spend twelve hours at a time studying code, so I could learn how to build online dungeons. Millions of people, as can be easily seen by the creativity exercised on the web, spend hours upon hours in deep, concentrated thought on a single item.
And second, even granted the antecedent, the consequent does not follow. The presumption here is that the only way we could have a long attention span is if our attention is guided in some way, as in a lengthy novel or other work. However, a person can demonstrate a lengthy attention span even when flitting from one thing to the next. I did that this afternoon, in fact, working my way through a series of issues related to Sunbird calendaring with Thunderbird on Ubuntu. I went through dozens of divverent sites, following a concentrated chain of reasoning that existed nowhere in print, but only in my head, as I deduced the solution to my problem one clue at a time. This is very typical of web reasoning; I have documented the process in some of my writing (for example, ‘Setting Up Sunbird’). In short, we can develop our capacity for concentrated thought through mosaics as well as with chains - and I daresay the skill that results from the former is a strengthened version of the latter, hardly weaker.
La seconda parte (specialmente quella in grassetto) esprime come in genere lavoro con internet, e non solo