Rhetorical Analysis

Sam Anderson argues that over the last several years, people have been starting to lose their attention a lot easier than before. He uses many personal examples as well as psychological experiments to show how attention is lost very quickly.
The way the author begins his argument was very interesting. He gives many examples of what might be going on though the readers mind before picking up this article. He kindly and jokingly tells the reader to forget about all these distractions and focus primarily on this article. What was funny was the fact that the author, throughout his paper, put many distractions to test the reader whether he/she could apply what they were reading on this article itself.
Anderson’s article, though it could be informational to all, seemed like it was directed more towards college students and a younger generation. All the examples that he gave were ones that I felt that people my age as well as myself could relate to.  I think he really pinpoints many of the criticisms of my technologically savvy generation. I will admit that I often notice my own inability to stay focused on one project at a time, especially if it involves a computer. I find myself automatically checking Facebook as soon as I open Firefox, forgetting whatever my original intention was. I also got distracted and ended up searching in Google the Boston Molasses Disaster after he mentioned it several times in his essay. 
One aspect of his article that gives me good credibility is the psychological experiments that he shares. The article talks about how distraction is “focused.” A positive example of distraction is also given when he talks about a sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; “one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.”And we hear about William James’ “dot experiment,” which led him to assert “that the human mind can’t actually focus on the dot, or any unchanging object, for more than a...