© Alamy
How many times do you click on your email icon in a day? Or look at Facebook, or Twitter? And how many times when reading on the internet do you click on a link navigating away from the text that was the original object of your enquiry? The web, it seems, is like an electronic sweet shop, forever tempting us in different directions. But does this mental promiscuity, this tendency to flit around online, make us, well, thicker?
The power of modern electronic media - the net, mobile telephones and video games - to capture the attention of the human mind, particularly the young mind, and then distract it has lately become a subject of concern. We are, say the worriers,
losing the ability to apply ourselves properly to a single task, like reading a book in its entirety or mastering a piece of music on an instrument, with the result that our thinking is becoming shallower. Sir Tom Stoppard aired a version of this view last week when he warned that the printed page was in danger of being "swept away" on a tide of technology, with the moving image assuming ever-greater precedence in the lives of young people.
"I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays," he said. "The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils, or even at the age of the teachers teaching them."
It was not a question of new media bad, old media good, he added, but the trend was there. And he is in good company. Barack Obama remarked of his over-fondness for tinkering with his BlackBerry: "Information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment."
