Scrawled in Wax

I don’t know about you, my fellow blog-readin’, RSS-subscribing, Twitter-updating friend, but in the last four or five years my attention span has, to put it mildly, been destroyed. While I could once perform slightly insane feats of focus – like, say, reading Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and then writing a 20-page paper on it all in the space of 36 hours – that is no longer the case.

And while it’s true that it probably has something to do with ‘the profound epistemological differences between the paper page and the screen’, my rapidly decreasing ability to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes might be better attributed to this, more basic fact: there’s just so fucking much out there.

There is, in fact, ‘just so fucking much out there’ that, upon opening my browser, I often sit in front of my computer feeling distinctly overwhelmed by the seemingly limitless possibility that sits in front of me. It is for this reason that, to this day, I will never simply browse YouTube or visit Digg, as to do so would remind me of the enormous glut of information I will never reign in, control or master. And though I do rely on personal aggregators like Google Reader and Instapaper, even then I star items – a way of marking articles you wish to read later – only to never return to them. The list of things I need to catch up on keeps growing and my willingness to tackle it decreases at a similar rate.

Imagine my surprise then, when I found myself doing the very things that cause me so much stress – reading old articles, discovering hidden gems on YouTube, and just generally ‘browsing’ – on my trusty iPhone. While I would never do so on my desktop or laptop, I take time on the subway, while waiting for a friend, or even when in bed, to catch up on all those things that I had once resigned myself to abandoning.

The last thing the tech blogosphere needs, of course, is another post praising the iPhone – and I don’t intend to. In fact, though I’d argue it is as revolutionary as everyone says, it’s precisely the limitations of the device that have made it such a boon to me. After all, while the best thing about the iPhone is its multifunctionality, what it cannot do is perform those many tasks all at once. And with the ability to multitask taken away, I find myself finally being able to focus on one thing at a time, a skill that, particularly if one is an academic, can come in handy from time to time.

At my desk, mired in the morass of articles I’ve marked to read later, I simply give in. On the subway, however, Instapaper’s simple, neat interface lets me read those careful analyses and important blog posts with a single-mindedness I just can’t muster when seated at a computer. Similarly, when I’m just killing time, the slow and singular nature of the iPhone’s YouTube app means that I can finally watch those videos from TED or academic talks that I’ve been putting off for so long.

In a funny way, the iPhone’s drawbacks mean it may be the closest thing to an electronic ‘book’ or ‘magazine’ I have come across. I mean this, perhaps, not so much literally – there are, after all, actual eBook readers out there – as metaphorically. The printed page does one thing and does it well – and the iPhone, in short temporary bursts anyway, inadvertently replicates this aspect of paper pretty effectively.

The ambivalent, amorphous nature of screen-based devices is, I think, both a blessing and a curse: blessing because they offer so much; curse because it is that very wealth of functionality that becomes overwhelming. What will be interesting is if, in the future, we will see a deliberate rather than accidental symbiosis between multi- and uni-function devices, such as the Instapaper application that is planned for release for the hot new e-book reader, the Amazon Kindle 2 (Don’t get your hopes up kids – it’s not and may never be available in Canada). That, to my mind, is the perfect balance: multitasking on the massive electronic web to gather information, and then going ‘lo-fi’ while offline, so that, at some point, one might finally pay all that great writing the attention it deserves.

Note: The image used in this post comes from this one over at zedomax that describes how to hack your iPhone to look like a book.