I can definitely understand what Nicholas Carr is talking about. I believe that it is true that people have lost a lot of their patience and willingness to really look for a certain piece of information. It is so easy now to just plug in a single word into Google and magically get thousands of hits on thousands of different websites. With so much information right in front of us, it would be utterly impossible to read it all and decide which source is the best source so instead people have developed the ability to skim through articles, training themselves to look for certain words. While there are times when this method of searching does work, people using it often miss things, sometimes things that are more important than the key words that they have trained themselves to look for. So people end up only knowing the outer layer, so to speak, of the subject they were searching for and losing any sort of depth they might have gained by reading the entire article. As a result of this skimming technique, people’s attention spans have decreased drastically to such a point as that the average person would probably spent no longer than five minutes on any one activity before getting bored and moving on. People get uninterested so much faster than anyone would have fifty years ago, and in a way this has caused us to become stupider as Carr suggests. It is true that because people move from topic to topic so quickly it is much more likely that they will know information on a huge variety of subjects, but it is also because of this loss of attention that it becomes rarer and rarer to find anyone who is a specialist on one topic or a group of related topics. Everyone can come up with the same couple of facts on any given subject, but no one has any depth of understanding of said subject. People can no longer focus on any one thing for a long period of time. No one has the patience to sit and read or listen to gain any sort of depth in a subject, the ability to focus has become very rare.
