Social media saps more than just short-term attention

The prevalent wisdom about why social media is distracting is that it provides a constant opportunity for immediate distraction. Whenever your work feels even the slightly unsatisfying, there’s the temptation to get a momentary break by looking at Facebook, and then you’ve spent fifteen minutes chatting away when you should have been working.

There’s a lot of truth to this. I’ve experienced it first-hand many times, and talked a lot about it in my essay about the addiction economy.

But I find that’s only a part of the problem. I find that in addition to sapping short-term attention, social media also damages long-term attention. (I’m focusing on social media here, because it’s the one that I’m the most hooked on myself – but any other source of quick, immediate reward would also have the same effect.)

Take a day when I don’t have access to social media, and don’t have anything else in particular to do, either. My typical behavior on such days is that I might be bored for a while, maybe take a walk, and then gradually, over some time, get ideas for projects that I could be doing, and start working on them.

Leave a Comment