Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2011 09:39:19 -0500
From: "Michael Walsh" <mjw at press.jhu.edu>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>, <wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Attention sppan?
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

"Lots of people think that the Internet has ruined today's kids. They
don't read, it seems. Google has rewired their brains and stunted their
attention spans. Are attention spans deteriorating? Forty years ago, the
length of Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and The Pity (at 4 hours 11 minutes)
or Andy Warhol's Empire (6 hours 36 minutes) was a sign of extreme
seriousness. Today, popular entertainments are vastly longer. J.M.
Straczynski's Babylon 5 was conceived as a single story told in more
than 100 hours of film. Joss Whedon's Buffy, The Vampire Slayer is a
coming of age story meant to be viewed over a period of seven years.
Harry Potter comes in seven volumes, none of them short, and when the
children have finished those, they enjoy Philip Pullman's His Dark
Materials, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and the 20 volumes of
Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin stories. If our attention span grows
short, one wonders where those mythic Victorians found time get anything
done."

--Mark Bernstein in the Atlantic magazine.

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=1398#m11559

mjw