Multi tab browsing and Millenial ADD
Musings on a broken browser experience.
Introduction
As you read this, tell me how many tabs do you have open in your browser? Probably Facebook, Twitter, Hacker news, an article which qualifies for TL;DR and YouTube paused at the new Spider-man trailer (which btw is awesome).
People talk a lot about the Millennial Generation’s ADD. Honestly, I can’t argue with it. It’s baffles me how I use to focus for hours reading dense philosophical works in college and now can’t for the life of me read past paragraph 3 of an average online article. Even though content is King and some gripping content truly holds you throughout multiple pages, I believe I have singled out the culprit that contributes the most to my lack of focus online. Multi-tab browsing.
The Usual Suspects
Usually, we are quick to point fingers at 140 character tweets, 6 second vines, self-destructing snaps, Summly summaries and the like for our newly acquired need for instant gratification, our impatience with long content. Our train of thought is literally one bogie long and a slew of startups cater to this now matter of fact market. However, I believe the root cause of this condition is friction-less multi-tab browsing whereby we hop around the Internet down a cascade of hyperlinks stopping only to get a quick lay of the land and then move onto next tab.
Multi-tabbed Mind
Picture how closely the Internet browser represents the modern mind. Easy and seemingly infinite breadth (until RAM depletion crash). Laborious and unwelcome depth. We dance through a minefield of distractions even in the innocent opening of a new tab to Google the meaning of a word. It’s no wonder that a web page is demarcated as above the fold and below the fold. It’s just too easy to open a new tab and check your Facebook notifications, to open a 9gag link your friend shared, etc. etc, until you impatiently close the tab with the article which got you here in the first place to make space for the opening of many more tabs.
Conclusion
I’m on paragraph 5 and so I better wrap this up for the probably 3o% of readers who made it this far. For us daily netizens, what do we gain and what do we lose from such breadth and lack of depth in our Internet browsing? How have the deleterious effects of online reading (a euphemism for skimming) spilled over into our offline reading of books and newspapers? Is it possible that the next time you open a tab, you ask yourself whether you have achieved the goal with which you opened the previous tab? And to the Hackers, I wonder whether enough dissatisfied people like myself could spur some of you into developing a new web browser, based on a different browsing experience, one in which breadth does detract from depth. Heck, if I had the coding chops, I’d love to give it a shot. But alas, I opened a new tab away from my reading of “Eloquent JavaScript” a while ago. Better get back to it.
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