If you've spent enough time on the internet, you've probably heard the term "attention economy", coined by Herbert A. Simon, who posited that attention was the "bottleneck of human thought" that limits both what we can perceive in stimulating environments and what we can do. He also noted that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."[^1] It's not only the volume of information that affects our comprehension, either. It's also the user interface and ultimate goal of social media websites, which is to get information out quickly for public interaction and consumption. A study conducted by Jiang et al.[^2] found that the need to interact quickly with content on microblogging sites (via likes or reposting) competes with the cognitive processing availability for reading comprehension: "Making feedbacks through reposting creates high demands for cognitive resources, which, in turn, compromises subsequent reading comprehension" (p. 213). In other notes, I have written on [[Cognitive Sustainability|cognitive sustainability]] and the idea that perhaps the internet needs to make space for "resting" points, or forced pauses from the constant consumption required by social media. Additionally, there is evidence that knowing that we continuously have access to a wealth of information via our computers and smartphones affects our memory. According to a study by Sparrow et al.,[^3] there "is preliminary evidence that when people expect information to remain continuously available (such as we expect with Internet access), they are more likely to remember where to find it than to remember the details of the item" (p. 778). In other words, we are continuously scrolling past loads of information that we are doomed to forget. I don't know that externalization of our memories to the internet is inherently good or bad. On one hand, our own memory is fallible, and we may spread misinformation should we accidentally share facts that we haven't remembered correctly. If we turn to a legitimate source on the internet, we can find the most up-to-date, accurate information on any topic we want. On the other hand, if we are constantly consuming information without remembering what we read, how do we actively make contributions of our own to science, art, or technology? [^1]: Mintzer, Ally. (2020). Paying Attention: The Attention Economy. _Berkeley Economic Review_. Retrieved December 14, 2021, from [https://econreview.berkeley.edu/paying-attention-the-attention-economy/](https://econreview.berkeley.edu/paying-attention-the-attention-economy/) [↩](#user-content-fnref-1) [^2]: Jiang, T., Hou, Y., & Wang, Q. (2016). Does micro-blogging make us “shallow”? Sharing information online interferes with information comprehension. _Computers in Human Behavior_, _59_, 210–214. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.02.008](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.02.008) [↩](#user-content-fnref-2) [^3]: Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. _Science_, _333_(6043), 776–778. [https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1207745](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1207745) [↩](#user-content-fnref-3)