On our first day back to school, we were assigned to read an article and reflect on it. You can look at the article yourself here.


In summary this article was about hard work and how it's usefulness in today's Information Age is slowly diminishing. It also stated that attention is what dominates this new age; through the internet. In short, companies competing with each other to gain our attention and interest are preventing most humans from engaging in hard work. Why? There are simple too many distractions, and companies take advantage of our inability to resist well.

"In one generation, we've gone from a total separation of "work" from "non-work" to one in which both work and play are always sitting right in front of us." I find this to be absolutely true. Whenever I try to go on the internet researching for a school project, atleast 6-8 advertisements show up on almost every website. It's very unconvienient because when you're working hard on a short deadline, and you have these popups and flashing lights everywhere, its almost impossible to focus solely on what you're doing. The internet has given us so much freedom-"Porn, gambling, funny videos, flirting, socializing, playing games, shopping -- it's all literally one click away."-as this quote states.

What I thought was even more disturbing is that you generally see more advertisements on sites in which children go on (game sites for example). The article similarly states that children are "addicted to screens before they even start high school." The sad truth here is that most of the attention children nowadays give is to the internet (away from the family). Again companies take advantage of their vulnerability and try to gain as much attention as possible.

The last sentence of this article is what really clicked on me: "Hard work is dead. Are you paying attention?" In my mind, it's almost like a tragic truth: hours and hours of working are worth less than a simple flashy banner. I guess that is the ultimate truth of this age: we want things to happen faster and quicker (attention>more advertisements seen>faster rate of sales), and we're simply too lazy to commit ourselves to working vigorously for long periods of time to achieve a higher quality of work.

"Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention." The solution? Well the article points out that the only thing you can do is resist. I'd have to agree, but as we all know one thing can lead to another. In my opinion it's best to avoid the problem: don't go onto the internet unless absolutely necesscary (especially children). It all boils down to how you control your own level of attention.