Are you part of the hive mind? Is your day spent texting and tweeting and chatting and talking on the phone, keeping you completely aligned with her network of friends and associates? This may be a good thing. Who am I to judge? But, if we lose those moments of quiet and sustained concentration, I suspect that a quality of thought will also disappear.
I’ve written about attention in this blog before. I started thinking about it again because of a series of articles about its flip side, distraction. Mobile devices, it seems, have become a real challenge in college classrooms. Professors are fighting back with digital etiquette, and, more creatively, incorporating devices into the lesson.
Tired of twitching? The technology of our times demands our attention. Texts, emails, tweets, social networks, etc. need to be checked. And like Pavlov, we respond to every ringtone, beep and chirp.
With ubiquitous connectivity and access to devices, the only escape is the off switch. The losses – in concentrated thinking, privacy and peace are so big we often miss them. Our real lives become background.
