No. I found that what got me re-focusing is just not flipping from thing to thing, or trying to do more than one thing at once. I re-trained my ears to focus with audiobooks, and the rest of me to zero in on what I am doing right now, e.g. reading just one thing at a time.

I have the attention span of a hyperactive puppy, which I attribute to the internet. I flip from site to site, and this translates to other things - I channel surf, I find it hard to concentrate on books, I start a task and then get distracted into doing something else before I finish the first thing ... It would probably do me good to have a break from the internet.

I like to think the internet made me all magpie but if I'm honest with myself, no I've always been like this, but it was doing homework with the TV On between reading a book while eating.

I think all it's done has magnified my already scattered tendencies.

Anecdata: the mister and I have imposed mandatory no-Internet times, and it's gotten a lot better since we've been on a meditation and mindfulness kick.

I've always been multi tasked, taking lots of things in small bites. My dad wrote a little memory-lane word picture that had me swinging on the swingset, playing a flutofone/recorder, and reading a book. I think I was nine or so.

I'm reading three different books right now (you know what I mean).

But it is easy to go down a bunny hole with the Internet. What I started doing on Thursdays was link dumping to my email. I can have upwards of 20 tabs open in different browsers of things I've been reading during the week. If it's still open on Thursday afternoon I'll copy the links to an email and send it to myself with some keywords. So far I've only gone back maybe twice, but I'm glad I have them saved. Those "read it later" sites just don't do anything for me. Tho thinking about it, Google Reader has been helpful.

It feels like my brain adapts to how I've been working. When I have several days in a row where I have to concentrate on one task for long periods of time, I get pretty good at that, but lose my ability to recover quickly from interruptions or switch to other tasks quickly.

And if I have several days in a row where I'm working on a million little things and constantly being interrupted, I get pretty good at that, but lose my ability to focus on any one thing for more than a few minutes.

I guess that kind of supports your friend's theory in a more general sense than just "the internet" as a cause.

Antidata: I've always been this way; looking back, I can't believe nobody suggested ADD to my parents. It may not have been well-known yet, but it was known. And I and every one of my siblings suffered noticeably from it, while getting the "if you'd just buckle down and apply willpower, you could accomplish so MUCH" BS. Right. Because *willpower* is an ADD kid's problem.

Anyway.

The Internet makes it easy to coddle the ADD. I have several rows of tabs open all day every day, and I flip from one to another every few minutes as the whim takes me.

But the Internet also gives me incentive to focus. There are really good articles out there, articles that require more attention than a few minutes here and there, and when I feel up to it I can spend half an hour, forty-five minutes trying to digest some of these. As an ADD sufferer, 20 minutes is typically my max, and has been for my whole life. (Sometimes trying to focus for more than 20 minutes causes killer headaches from the stress, but I can usually spot these on the horizon and move on.)

Nah, I think my attention span has developed, with all of the wonders of the 'net available to me.

Funny you should ask because I was thinking the same thing. Not that, like the rest of you, I haven't always been this way, but because I now get to practice making it worse every day.

As far as willpower is concerned, I was just reading this, referred from the blue.

I do honestly think my ability to stay focused (or interested) in something has been seriously whittled-away over years of web-surfing. Given the amount of time I spend online, with the re-training of my brain through the constant flipping-around from site to site, I find it very difficult to stay interested/focused on anything for longer than a few moments. I don't find this a good thing. I find it makes me feel less than human in some odd way.

Yes, I think so. I certainly have a pre-existing tendency to be distracted by my own thoughts and curiosity, and to switch attention rapidly and become swiftly bored with things that are insufficiently attention-commanding. But there's no doubt in my mind that the internet exacerbates this and makes me indulge it to an irritating degree. There is some research emerging on the causes of ADD-like behaviors that talks about how attention in the brain is managed by a reward system, where the brain rewards itself with pleasurable chemicals for reaching objectives, and that in people with ADD-like symptoms, attention drops off faster than in others and these biochemical rewards don't kick in soon enough to keep you paying attention to something when the focus starts to decline - so the mind moves on, looking for the next objective to achieve the reward.

This is how I feel sometimes when roaming on the internet, especially when I find myself clicking through a set of tabs to check websites I just checked minutes ago for new updates, or following some unimportant and idle curiosity down the rabbit hole when I have other things to do. When I bring my awareness to what I'm doing, I realize that there's a little bit of a 'junkie' feel to my behavior, that I'm repetitively looking for something the internet cannot provide. I'm working on this and generally will make myself get up and do some physical task when I fall into this state.

But I'm certain the internet doesn't just provide a platform for the behavior, but exacerbates it - because I tend to take mostly internet-free vacations (since I have no smartphone or laptop, I'm not even tempted), and I always find, at the end of the time away, that my mind is a lot sharper. Part of that could be the relaxation of vacation and absence of stress, but I can feel myself letting go of the reaction of constantly seeking novelty and do a little better at 'just being'.

To help me deal with this, I got an e-reader. I figured I needed to retrain my brain to focus a) on long-form texts (as opposed to self-contained snippets) and b) for longer stretches of time. I could have done it with regular books, but I honestly don't like carting books around and the e-reader gives me "shiny new gadget" feeling that makes me want to use it frequently.

I think it's helping -- as of today, I'm 22% of the way through Moby Dick (which I've always wanted to read but never have). No way would I have gotten that far with a physical copy.