Actually ADD or ADHA did exist 30 years ago. It simply had not been named. I know because my 40 year-old son has it as did his father before him as well as my grandson. Back then it was simply written off as 'stupid', 'lazy', 'undisciplined'. These folks were almost labeled as troublemakers.
Luckily when my son reached the first grade I ran into a very enlightened teacher who recognized the issues. The schools were just beginning to address them. She told me I would have to either wait for the schools to catch up or have my own testing done at my expense. $600 was very expensive back then for a young widow with a 6 year-old but we managed.
That psychologist was right on the money. He pegged everything and gave me a plan to follow. The reason I know he was right because it is the exact same plan my grandson is using now - without the drugs. I'm happy to say it worked but having seem many other people my son's age I can say that without it he would have either been homeless or in prison. Because of it he has a very successful IT career.
A constant stream of information flowing into our minds from our computers, smartphones and tablets is causing us to lack in concentration, and split our attention from tasks we should be focusing on.
Apparently, anyway.
The theory put forward by psychologists and neuroscientists is that our memories are being ‘eroded’ by instant communications, social networking and emails, which causes our concentration levels to drop. Our ability to consume short bursts of information allegedly impacts our ability to consume larger amounts of data and information, such as content found in books.
I guess it could be compared to ADHD 2.0 - attention defecit hyperactivity disorder, but with a technological twist.
But I am not too convinced.
On any typical day, I will have my browser open with the typical email window, Facebook and Twitter, plus Google News, a stream of tabs from the BBC, and that is just on one of my monitors. The other has another browser dedicated to my writing and other miscellaneous tabs of ‘things to do later’, which inevitably gets put off until the next working day.
The argument is far too subjective over the term ‘attention’. I get bored very quickly, which is why I work so much. I bounce between writing, studying and reading relevant academic literature near constantly to keep myself entertained.
Arguably, my internal wiring isn’t exactly perfect. I suffer from TS; linked to co-morbidity with other conditions, like ADD, ASD, OCD and dyslexia. While I only have the dyslexia part (maybe I am in the wrong line of work), I would not be a suitable benchmark to measure this newfangled technology-driven disorder.
Let us not forget that ADHD, or ADD - however you want to acronymise it, didn’t exist thirty years ago. It hadn’t been invented. So now we are left to categorise new patterns of behaviour that we exhibit based on new technologies and societal changes.
But to claim the age old myth that ‘literacy is dead’ is untrue. Young people read more now than they may have done in the past, as information is instant and linked elsewhere. Personally, I can be stuck reading Wikipedia for hours, just by clicking on things that interest me, and others are the same.
The quality of the literature, however, may not be up to the standards of Dickens or Wordsworth. But the risk to traditional book reading may not be helped by technological advances like the Kindle.
Either you are a book reader, or you are not, in my opinion. Academically, there is a reason why we ‘read’ a particular subject as opposed to simply ’studying’ it, but that comes with the territory.
Young people are not reading less; just less of the good stuff.
