Twits

For those who missed it, the UK’s Guardian ran a pretty good April 1 leg-puller along the same vein.

I’m not the first to speculate on possible intellectual damage from text messaging*, but I tend to agree that today’s instant, stream-of-consciousness forms of communication are harming our ability to think. Twitter’s entire premise not only reinforces blurting out minimalist, choppy thoughts, it actively discourages taking the time to form full, well-rounded ideas. It also conditions the brain to quickly abandon its previous thought and immediately move on to the next, popping (and pooping) ideas with the mental length of enjoyment and nutritional value of jelly beans.

I realize that the same complaints were made about MTV in the 1980s, and about television in general for years before that (anyone remember “Television, the Drug of a Nation“?). The lamentation that Interstates destroyed our appreciation for roadside America began almost the moment the system’s ribbon was cut. I do believe that this has been an ongoing, accelerating process for quite some time. A daylong road trip cut down to a race from Point A to Point B; storytelling reduced from four-hour epic films to one-hour television dramas to 3 1/2-minute music videos. Today, I fear that the ever-reducing drain on our attention spans has minimalized them to the point where our world view has exploded into fragments, and as a result we’re now seeing the wholesale erosion of  this generation’s critical-thinking skills and ability to process ideas.

* “Texting”: not a verb. Knock it off.