The generation gap: has the advent of the Internet blocked our ability to focus?

Sophomore Henry Ling glances at his Facebook home page. Without scrolling down, a quick count reveals around 80 links, but he quickly ignores them and switches to another tab.

Although seemingly routine and mundane, this action reveals a subtle ability to scan information quickly and subconsciously, while never focusing on anything for a sustained time. As a result of these abilities and tendencies, pundits suggest that the Internet generation may have lost the ability to think and ponder.

Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times, puts forward this opinion in a piece called “The Twitter Trap.”

“The pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills,” Keller writes. “Navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship.”

The plethora of information available on the Internet, though some of it useful, may also have detrimental effects, according to Keller.

“Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans,” Keller continues. “And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?”

Ling, whose parents immigrated from China, said that his father can concentrate longer on his work longer than he can.

“I think that as a child, he had less distractions, so naturally he learned to focus,” Ling said. “Besides, if he couldn’t focus, he probably wouldn’t [have made it to] America.”

Ling also thinks that the Internet is responsible for the shortened attention span among young people.

“If you go on a site like Yahoo [News], 99 percent of the information you don’t actually read,” Ling said. “You just click on the more interesting headlines.”

To escape the constant stream of information, guests at hotels such as Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms.

In Pico Iyer’s “The Joy of Quiet,” he writes that “the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts, which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.”

In South Korea, there are even Internet Rescue Camps, sponsored by the government and completely tuition-free, according to The New York Times.

“It is most important to provide them experience of a lifestyle without the Internet,” said Lee Yun-hee, a counselor. “Young Koreans don’t know what this is like.”

Students express difficulty focusing because of Facebook and have had to work around the temptation.

“I quit Facebook whenever finals week comes,” junior Alex Wang said. “I would probably delete it if it didn't have all of the academic groups and stuff ... that's what I use it for primarily, but News Feed pops up and I sometimes get distracted.”

Perhaps most revealing is the poll in last year’s Falcon senior magazine.

“How many hours do you spend on the Internet every night?,” the question asked.

The majority, 29.2 percent, of seniors answered, “I can’t find the logoff button.” Only 3.6 percent said that they spent less than an hour online.