I’ve been diagnosed with ADD, and my shrink has too, and something we talk about pretty often is how it’s 1,000,000 times easier for me to stick with a task if it’s on the computer (which my paid work mostly is, these days, but my art stuff isn’t), and even easier for me to waste hours doing nothing in particular on the computer when I want to be doing other things. This has been true since I was 9 or 10, but it got worse when the Net came along. I do have techie aptitudes but it’s not all about that, because a note about gardening (reading it or writing it) can be just as entrancing as coding, as long as it’s on the screen. I never was much of a TV watcher, though.
Although our discussions haven’t done a whole lot so far to reduce my time-wastage, they’ve been pretty illuminating. I can’t be arsed to find studies now, but what I’ve heard anecdotally fits with my shrink’s opinion that for ADDers, the Internet is a double-edged sword (double-edged tube?). Of course it can be very, very, very, very distracting; there’s an apparently infinite selection of different visual snacks at any time, and because of variable reinforcement, the fact that many of the snacks are nothing special actually makes the compulsion worse. This is a good trap even for those “normal” brains I’ve heard about. “Duh”, as the psychologists say.
The part that’s more specific to those with weird wiring—which is both the good edge and the bad edge—is that a computer is just an awfully attractive medium for doing things in general, if you have trouble with linearity and time and space. Nitpicker says: “Wait! A computer is a linear-minded thing, so wouldn’t people with well-organized minds like it better? I’ve seen robots in movies and they don’t have ADD.” Sort of a good point, you annoying nitpicker. Yes, the machine works that way inside; but now that we’re not using punched cards any more, we have interfaces that are built around the general idea of tasks and objects that have lives of their own, like my room and my head, but more reliable. Never mind icons and menus—even in old command-line systems, you had some form of multitasking, and the basic idea that if you put something in a file it stays there even when you can’t see it. This is awfully comforting; there’s almost no way for me to drop a digital item behind my desk or put it in the pocket of my other pants. And word processing might as well have been invented for people who can’t figure out the point they were trying to get to until they’ve typed 3 paragraphs of digressions—I can write by hand just fine, but good luck trying to read all the stuff I added in the margins and corners and in between the lines. There’s some good work going on these days with adapting computer tools to suit the needs of ADD students even better (and I hope that’ll carry over into better user interface design for everyone).
So there’s the basic organizational thing, but there’s also an experiential thing that’s harder to quantify. If you have trouble juggling sensory inputs, and holding a fixed model of your environment in your brain, that screen is great. In many work and life situations that wouldn’t seem chaotic to you, I tend to feel sort of like a crazed little fish flopping around inside a gumball machine: every little move makes all the gumballs slide and bump all over, and if you can manage to get your little fish mouth around a gumball, it fills up your whole head until you spit it back out. The computer takes a mini-universe of stuff and presents it all through a single surface. There can be a jillion things going on visually and conceptually, but you can sit comfortably outside of them, using a limited range of two senses. It’s like being a big fish who can stand in front of the gumball machine and have gum dispensed to you as you’d expect. The down side of this is, it’s such a relief that you may be tempted to keep standing at that machine even when you don’t need gum.
Another good thing: if you’re going to go off on mental tangents every few minutes anyway, it’s less disruptive to flip over to the Net and find that temporarily essential random fact than to get up and mosey across the house to see if you have a book about that, and notice that you haven’t put away those other books, and decide to get rid of some of them, and start looking for other things to take to Goodwill, and play with that wind-up dinosaur one last time before you get rid of it, etc., etc., which is not the kind of dérive I really enjoy.