Down the rabbit hole: Getting lost in cyberspace

I frequently tell my students to “stay in the moment,” as their minds begin to drift out the door and I am left lecturing to dead eyes. We often hear adults talking about the attention span, or lack thereof, of adolescents today.  I would argue, however, that our [adults] ability to stay in the moment is no better or worse. This is unquestionably due to the digital age where searching the web for one piece of information can turn into a browsing nightmare, and before you know it, you are buying something from Amazon.com that you didn't even know you wanted in the first place. The epicenter of getting lost in cyberspace is on YouTube.com, where an entire day can pass by clicking on video after video after video. Similarly to the candy question, “how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie-pop?”, I was wondering, “how many clicks does it take to get completely sidetracked from your topic of interest?” 

I am a high school psychology teacher, so the obvious choice was to start with the key word, “psychology” in the search menu.  For consistency, I decided to click on the first video that popped up in the right hand side of my screen. It usually stated, “Featured video” next to it. The first video was seamless, finding Paul Bloom, a psychology professor from Yale I have listened to before. The title: The Psychology of Everything. Professor Bloom discussed why students should be interested in taking psychology, including various topics psychologists study.

I glanced over to the next “featured video” and I knew I was in trouble. It read, Psychology of Pleasure, Over-Stimulation & Addiction. Now, the lesson featured a woman discussing the science of pleasure and over-stimulation. I can handle that. BUT, when I think of typing it the words “pleasure” and “over-stimulation” into the World Wide Web, you know you are in for trouble and some serious side-tracking.

I was thinking it would take me about 9 or 10 “clicks” to get lost into cyberspace, but no…It took me 3. The next “featured video” to my right could not have been anymore far-removed from my initial search of “psychology.” The next video YouTube.com offered me was News Anchor Fail Compilation. I’ll admit, I was done with my experiment but I had to watch the 7:37 min. clip of journalists saying and doing ridiculous stuff. I soon forgot what I was even doing.

Now, you may be wondering, “what if this was a mistake?” and maybe the next “featured video” would lead me back to psych. Wrong. The next two videos were The Funniest News Bloopers on YouTube and Frozen Pool Fail.

I wonder if the people at YouTube.com purposely take you on an endless journey, spiraling down a bottomless video archive. All I know is that whether you are 19 or 29 years old, the digital age has….sorry, lost my train of thought.