On 10/1/98 2:50 PM, Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) passed this wisdom:
I guess I know too many stone geniuses who've had computers since they were children -- most of the people on this list were raised that way, I would bet -- to take this crap too seriously, reduced attention "spans" or not.
By the way, "span" is the wrong word for ADD. I was hardly raised on TV, much less computers, (I had my face in science fiction books throughout most of my childhood), and I've been known to focus on something "inappropriately" for hours.
Ever since I discovered my ADHD some two or three years after I started working with ADHD kids in the our school district a lot of things began to make sense. But I came to realize and now make it a point to tell these kids that taken as a whole ADD/ADHD is a blessing more so than a curse. The ability to hyper-focus on a task at hand gives you the power to do in a few hours sometimes things it would take others a day or more to do. For the truly ADD kid (as opposed to the culturally induced variety) the hell he has gone through and the incredible low self-esteen they generally have, just hearing that is often enough to make a radical turn-around for them.
While I certainly have varying degrees of control of my attention, but I just don't see that a "handicap" anymore. My attention is event-driven, rather than processed in neat organized batches, and I've learned to like it that way, even if it did give me trouble when I was chained in the aforementioned tower's dungeon for most of my formative years.
Besides, even if computers cause people to have event-driven attention rather than in nice neat industrial batches, that's probably a Good Thing(tm). Consider it evolution in action.
Farmers and mechanics may need "control" of their attention, but in an information "hunter" like myself, most of the people who do anything useful on the net, it's a selective disadvantage.
... amen!!! Brian B. Riley --> http://members.macconnect.com/~brianbr For PGP Keys <mailto:brianbr@together.net?subject=Get%20PGP%20Key> "The 2nd amendment guarantees all the rest."