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.
Someday, someone will invent a technology that prevents posts from being EATEN like mine just was… *&^%@
AS I WAS SAYIN, I think that texting/tweeting and other forms of micro communication are merely adaptive responses to the volume and speed of information people are expected to deal with now. Such volumes were unthinkable 20 / 50 / 100 years ago. The only logical response to the expectation that we absorb it all is to reduce the length of our responses. It’s the classic project management triangle of time / quality / resources– where when you have greater demands at one point (in this case, time) it reduces the other point (in this case, quality). I am not sure I see it as a bad thing as much as a tradeoff.
Comment by Strikethru — April 14, 2009 @ 11:46 am
My Gen-Y students all agree they multitask better than previous generations, and that they work smarter instead of harder.
That said, any student caught texting during my class is asked to leave. Call me a curmudgeon, but I’m not competing with social networking during class. Most profs have this kind of rule in their syllabus, and we’re not kidding.
Not one student in all of my classes this semester has a blog. Not one. Most of them don’t know what blogs are. My students live their lives through text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter, a steady, 24-hours-a-day stream of micro information.
When we had a shooting on campus this year, Facebook messaging beat the university’s emergency notification system by a full 20 minutes.
Comment by monda — April 16, 2009 @ 6:50 pm
“Most of them don’t know what blogs are.”
Really? Wow. Does this mean that within the span of a decade blogs have fulfilled the same life span–and now reside in the same realm of quaint obsolescence in the minds of young folk–as typewriters?
Comment by olivander — April 16, 2009 @ 7:19 pm