It’s midnight and I am scrambling to finish a paper. In spite of the fact that it’s due tomorrow, I don’t start working on it until I have checked my email, my Facebook and, finally, my Pinterest.

As a recent convert to Pinterest, at first I fell in love with the site, until I began to realize that Pinterest has started to ruin my already short attention span.

Continually, studies warn about the effect of Internet browsing on people’s ability to focus; a 2009 study at Stanford University showed that people who continually browse for different information on the Internet don’t have as good a memory and cannot pay attention as well as people who focus on one thing at a time.

I have felt this way ever since I got a Facebook account. I can read for maybe half an hour at most before I have to check Facebook, and I had to block myself from it during finals week so that I could finally focus. In spite of the fact that I was struggling to pay attention with just one social media site, I decided to get a Pinterest account this semester.

For those of you who don’t know what Pinterest is, it is basically everything a girl could want in a website. Users can post pictures of basically whatever they think is interesting, so many of the pictures involve cute pets or kids, travel destinations, clothes, food, new beauty tips, attractive men or inspirational quotes.

As a person who hates complete disorganization, it’s the layout of the Pinterest website that I hate. If you go to the homepage, it consists almost entirely of all of these types of images just thrown up that users have recently posted and that have almost nothing in common except for the fact that someone somewhere thinks it’s cool.

This layout adds to the ADD that I suddenly seem to acquire when I get on the Internet. As I am browsing the Pinterest website, I can’t seem to look at just one thing at a time. I just jump from one image to the next, spending maybe a maximum of 20 seconds looking at an image.

When I first got my Pinterest account, I was so excited and wanted to “repin” everything I saw that looked cool to my account. But now, when I see an image I like, I think “oh, I should come back to that.” Ten minutes later, as I am looking at something else, I completely forget what the image was that I really liked.

I know that this lack of focus isn’t something new, but I definitely think that the Pinterest website promotes it more than most websites, by trying to cram as much information as possible onto one page.

Rather than just focusing on one interest at a time, it encourages users to post as many things as they find interesting at the same time. Not that this is always a bad thing, but on the Internet, this information overload is unnecessary. It encourages just browsing information, rather than looking deeply into something and actually remembering it.

Although I will continue to use my Pinterest account, as I have looked at my use of it more carefully I have definitely come to the conclusion that Pinterest has caused my Internet browsing to become more focused on quantity of information rather than quality.

So, I am going to try and go on Pinterest more sparingly and use it to look more for things that I am truly interested in, rather than what might catch my eye for a moment.