Students think I'm an old git when I tell them to read books, rather than web articles or YouTube clips.
I'm not really sure anyone really knows the long term effects on our brains of the immediacy of information, the range of formats it is available in, or the short timescale of so much of it. A further suggestion of the dangers posed by what I refer to as the three minute culture, comes from Sir Alex Ferguson's press conference at Old Trafford on Friday 11 January:
"Perhaps the most remarkable of the United manager's observations was that players no longer have the powers of concentration to sit down and watch a full 90-minute match video. "Going back 20 years, we gave them a full video of the game" he said. "We don't do that now because the concentration of players watching a full game is not there. But if you condense it into various aspects of our opponents then it works and that's what we do".
Quoted in Ian Herbert's "Ferguson: It's A Long Road For Liverpool", The Independent 12 January 2013.
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