attention: deficit!
We all got such short little spans of attention these days, we’re like deer in the median strip of the 6 lane digital highway. Used to be we prized skills like concentration, stick-to-it-ness, focus, diligence, all those traits that are long lost to anyone unlucky enough to own a television or a computer. Now we admire Multi-Taskers, jugglers of e-mail, news crawls, Facebook, text messages and a cellphone conversation while whipping up a dinner for the family between commercials during Fox news. Call me Old School, put a dunce hat on me and make me sit in a corner, but I don’t buy this multi-tasking one little bit. I taught school awhile before I took an early retirement and I’ve tried to teach attention deficit kids whose sole operational mode was switching from one thought to six others in the space of a minute. Trust me —this is a prescription for not learning much of anything, plenty of little.
Deep thinking seems to be a Lost Art. Down at the South End even Shallow Thinking has taken a hike. We got computers, TV, You-Tube, Linked-In, all that stuff like you-all, meaning, we got 3 minute max attention spans. My pals can’t listen to a whole CD — they hit random play and make a radio station out of their CD players.
The world is on constant Channel Surf, snippets of one crummy show, check out the ball scores, click to the news crawlers, bounce through 37 channels of Nature/Food/CNN/chopped liver then start over. The internet should be banned unless we’re on Ritalin.
I just hope there are people, few though they may be, living in some remote island of the Digital World, maybe its south tail end, who can still Concentrate, who can plan and build — from start to finish without checking their stock quotations — a nuclear reactor or a Boeing 747 or a skyscraper or a cure for brain cancer.
I had hoped to end this on some pithy, humorous, neatly bundled conclusion — I really had. But … damn if I can remember where we started. Something about crummy memory, I think. All I can say is Alzheimer’s should hold no fear for most of us. We’ve already programmed ourselves for it…..
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