INTERNET SPECIAL..Don't fall prey to that internet trap

Portal navigation is designed to keep users engrossed

Here's how mindless surfing works. You switch on your computer. You check your email and log on to your instant messenger. A friend - a contact on your instant messenger - has pasted the web address of a new article. You click on the link and start reading the article. Midway through the piece there is a link to an author who has been mentioned in the article. Online tricks You stop reading the original article and click on the author's link. That link takes you to the homepage of the author where you discover what an interesting personality the author is. On the side bar of the author's homepage you see link to Youtube where an interview of the author has been uploaded. Naturally you want to watch that interview. On Youtube, while the video is loading, you look at the side bar again and discover that there is a documentary by the author on another important literary figure. Naturally you must see that also to augment your mental 'bandwidth'. Oblivious to you the passage of time continues unabated. Suddenly someone at work nudges you. You look around and find your colleague who wants to know what you're up to. You tell the colleague you've been reading up an author online. But for some strange reason, despite all your reading, you have a totally different web page opened up right before you. To make it worse, you can't really explain how you got to that web page. It's been three hours since you first began checking on the author. That's Mindless surfing. Falling attention span If mindless surfing is the problem, then a diminishing attention span is the manifestation of it? Too closely related to the post-modern phenomenon of mindless surfing, this crisis of diminishing attention span feeds and perpetuates mindless surfing. One reads so much online these days that nothing stays in memory at the end of the day. One of the first side-effects of the network age and economy to be discovered and publicly acknowledged by all stake holders involved, depleting attention spans have become so common that the condition is no longer a problem but more like a norm. No one wants to read or grasp anything that more than six web pages long. Not for the paucity of time, thankfully, but for the innumerable distractions that appeal to your reason, intellect and the need to amass knowledge. Our minds are not prepared to jump subjects at the whims of a click and respond attentively to every new or related subject introduced randomly simply on account of clicking a weblink. Such is the power of mindless surfing and the resultant falling attention span on the human mind that afflicted people have now developed software that stops you every five minutes and asks you if you know what you're doing, surfing strange web pages when you could have been working on an important task. (Mayank Tewari DNA091024)