by Orrin Konheim

Created on: November 20, 2008

In the internet age, everyone's attention spans are getting shorter and a lot is being left out. My sophomore year in college, for example, I had a roommate who had a few habits that got on my nerves. He would cycle through his mp3s and never be able to play a single song all the way through. He would never be able to watch a half hour TV show, instead perferring highlights on ESPN, clips from Saturday Night Live reruns (back when they aired on Comedy Central), and MTV videos.

It frustrated me that he could never sit all the way through a program without changing the channel. I would listen to entire CDs from start to finish, watch entire movies, and plays. I would go to class and listen throughout the entire lecture. How awful it must be to have that small an attention span, that my poor roomate, has, I thought?

Fast foward 5 years later and after discovering the joys of youtube and other forms of internet video for the past year and a half or so I've turned into him. This is the tragic thing that youtube has done to me.

With so many forms of entertainment being available to me everytime I log into a computer, I want to experience them all and can't sit still too long at any one thing before something else grabs my attention. Why watch an entire episode of the Conan O'Brien show where you can just see the clips of the skits since it's on MTV's site? Why listen to the radio when you can get any song you want on demand? I started taking those shortcuts toward instant gratification and I'm having trouble finding my way out. My primary form of entertainment has gone from two-hour long movies to a one-hour long drama like heros to half hour shows to clips of Monty Python, Conan O'Brien or Mad TV on youtube and it's affecting everything I do.

I can't sat still through lectures and often through work I find myself channeling through youtube, a tv show on demand, or some other video or radio station site. I can't watch TV through the commercial breaks and I'm often alternating between two or more shows. I'm an instant gratification junkie, in short, and I'm fully aware that's a more chaotic and less peaceful place that both society and myself have fallen prevy to.

How is this a problem? Well, aside from the obvious answers of all the ways a shortened attention span makes it more difficult to focus on anything and get anything done, I feel like we can't fully appreciate anything at all as well. Remember Beethoven's 5th symphony? Oh, silly me, I forgot that you folks in

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