Attention spa--ooo, look, pretty pebble!

I was hanging around with a friend last night, poking about on the internet (the fact that surfing the net is social activity...can of worms I'm not going to tackle at the moment), and found a youtube video someone had linked to. Nothing particularly profound or interesting, an upload of a music* video, about 4 minutes long. The song was repetitive and the concept behind the video revealed itself very quickly, and I soon lost interest. My friend made a comment about short attention span.

I don't know if it's that I never really "got in to" to the whole music videos thing, or that as part of the post-mtv generation, my attention cannot be held by even the shortest of sustained stimuli.

My computer went smokey melty doom the other day (using aluminum foil to help hold the A/C adapter into the computer is apparently a decidedly bad idea), and I was without computer for a while, until a friend lent me an old one, which took several hours of me trying on my own, then 4 hours at ITS to get on the network. As I sat, waiting for it to run all the programs it needed to run and check and poke and prode around inside itself, I did class reading.

Somewhere during those 4 hours, I realized it was the most intensive, consecutive work I had done all semester, save the first week, when I was awaiting the arrival of a new power source for my computer (slamming cords in car doors is also a decidedly bad idea). I also felt incredibly nervous and anxious without MY computer to check MY pages. The sense of the computer, the net as...well, as a life line, as something I need to check with a high degree of regularity to function as a human, is very...startling? sobering? to realize. It interupts my life to a disturbingly large extent, but it feels necessary. It physically hurt my brain to spend so much concentratyed time on one thing, not being able to jump around and multitask and check to see if some webcomic had updated yet (which are also very good for short attention spans).

*My greatest regret with the increasing digitization of music is the decreasing physical size of the media, as this leads to the downfall of album art. While I have troubles following a music video, I could spend hours content looking through old album covers.