Summary of Addicted to Distraction In Tony Schwartz’s article Addicted to Distraction, originally published in The New York Times on November 28, 2015, he explains through his personal experience that Internet Addiction, a common phenomenon in modern day society, interrupts people’s brain and divides their attention in order to receive and absorb intriguing information online, which as a result, distracts people from their work and daily lives and hinders their ability of processing useful information into long-term memory. Schwartz begins the article with his personal anecdote that how he suddenly realizes the significant amount of time he has spent online deteriorates his reading habit and causes lack of concentration unconsciously while reading.
To demonstrate that addiction to the Internet does interfere with people’s lives remarkably, Schwartz refers to the ideas from Nicolas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, “The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention… We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of
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However, the craving for the Internet will undermine people’s ability to convert new knowledge into long-term memory. Schwartz illustrates this using the spilling water example. A human brain can only contain a certain amount of information, just like a cup can be filled