I feel a little too plugged in at the moment.
I have joined the Twitter juggernaut. After doing so, I'm sort of wondering: do we need to be this connected to one another? Do I need to know about shopping excursions, or bathroom breaks? Back in the day, people only wrote letters about the truly monumental: paper was expensive, the postal service took forever, and it wasn't cheap for postage either. Nowadays, nothing is really monumental anymore when we tweet about a new baby with the same inflection we give to stubbing a toe on the door. Are we doing ourselves and future generations a disservice by this?
A recent study by the University of Southern California thinks we might be, claiming that in what has become a society of instant updates, we aren't giving our brains long enough to form emotional empathetic connection, or generate compassion for others. Read more here. "Continuous partial attention"? People already have short attention spans! Do we really need this to get any worse?
So, I am on Twitter, and you can follow me there if you like, but I'm having a little overload right now.
And, don't expect me to tweet about bathroom breaks.
I have joined the Twitter juggernaut. After doing so, I'm sort of wondering: do we need to be this connected to one another? Do I need to know about shopping excursions, or bathroom breaks? Back in the day, people only wrote letters about the truly monumental: paper was expensive, the postal service took forever, and it wasn't cheap for postage either. Nowadays, nothing is really monumental anymore when we tweet about a new baby with the same inflection we give to stubbing a toe on the door. Are we doing ourselves and future generations a disservice by this?
A recent study by the University of Southern California thinks we might be, claiming that in what has become a society of instant updates, we aren't giving our brains long enough to form emotional empathetic connection, or generate compassion for others. Read more here. "Continuous partial attention"? People already have short attention spans! Do we really need this to get any worse?
So, I am on Twitter, and you can follow me there if you like, but I'm having a little overload right now.
And, don't expect me to tweet about bathroom breaks.
1 comment:
I know what you mean- I think each medium has it's uses-- right? I mean- my family that live far away family enjoy my mindless chatter about family life on my blog-- things I wouldn't even email about...
But I enjoy making handmade cards and taking time to send someone a handwritten note of appreciation or just thinking of you.... I've become quite sentimental to these traditional notes ( more than a text thxs, or email.)
on a side note- so glad I met you!
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