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It’s the Day Before 2014 and I Already Need to Catch My Breath

 I’m kind of amazed you’re even reading this post right now. It’s hard to sift through the vastness of Internet space and actually settle on any one thing for longer than, say, it takes to finish this sentence.

So if you’re still here, then … to say our attention spans in 2013 were fragmented is the understatement of the decade. And to say they’ll disintegrate even more in 2014 is maybe the safest new year prediction ever.

Tablets, game consoles, cellphones, Dick Tracy-style watches that sync with our cellphones, they all conspire to pull at us, begging for our attention and leading us further and further away from what our parents used to call concentration.

When’s the last time you sat down and read an entire book, cover to cover, after all?

Writes The Atlantic’s senior editor Alexis C. Madrigal:

I am not joking when I say: it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet. Because at least Ulysses has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished.

Madrigal goes on to talk about how the Internet is dominated with what is called “the stream,” wherein articles and posts are prioritized by how new they are. You know, like this post you likely found because it was at the top of the list of posts (and the only one to show up in 2014 so far). More from Madrigal:

In a world of infinite variety, it’s difficult to categorize or even find, especially before a thing has been linked. So time, newness, began to stand in for so many other things. And now the Internet’s media landscape is like a never-ending store, where everything is free. No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There’s always something more.

Madrigal believes, and I am so very much hoping he’s right, that people are beginning to look for borders because of that unceasing chaos of characters. Email newsletters are once again growing in popularity because they’re self-contained. (And, indeed, we’ve seen that with the Plugged In eNewsletter throughout 2013.) A litany of popular (and personal, not algorithm-based) aggregators pushing positive stories is yet another reaction. “The whole point of their posts is that they are idealized stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They provide closure,” says Madrigal. “They are rocks that you can stand on in the stream, just to catch your breath.”

And we do need to catch our breath … next year.