Short Attention Spans

I am always really put off by the two ends of postmodern "attention span" theory--that young people have none, or that this generation has it in excess. The arguements for the former usually hover in the hackneyed, Cassandra-like "death of classical music" (or "-poetry" or "-experimental fiction" or "-experimental cinema); the arguments for the latter, a favorite of Greg Sandow and an article about graphic novels in the New Yorker (apparently they are more demanding than regular old novels because of the difficult need to toggle back and forth between image and text). But this piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer comes down on the side of this argument I've always suspected to be true: that nothing has really changed, that "things" are neither better nor worse.