This morning I saw a young woman walking her dog past our house as she talked on her cell phone. Seeing someone walking a dog past our house is a common sight, especially since we live a few blocks away from the Wisconsin Humane Society. Volunteers daily walk through the neighborhood with dogs. Also seeing someone walking down the street talking on the phone is a common site. In this day and age cell phones are everywhere with almost everyone. Someone that seems talking to their self in a grocery store is probably someone with a cell phone ear plug and mike.
The digital revolution — computers, email, texting, especially social networks like Facebook and Twitter — have changed our way of communicating. Communication can be nearly instant. Something can happen in one part of the world and be known by the entire world immediately. I fear that it has also changed our way of thinking and looking at the world. So much information, so many images and thoughts come to us each day that the only way we can deal with all of it, is to ignore it or make it shorter.
Twitter, a social network where messages or tweets can only be 140 characters, allows someone to follow every little move of another person they are following.
My fear is that with instant information in small bites and with so much of it, communication becomes shallower. We can communicate with more people, even at one time, but how deep is the communication? Information, ads, opinions and facts are flashed to us in such great number that it is impossible to consider them all. Doing nothing, one of my favorite pastimes, makes one feel guilty. Taking a position of what is right and wrong is left for conservatives. We get lots of information on major news events but learn little from history. We move from issue to issue, concern to concern as if knowing more was better than deeply understanding what we know.
This ‘attention deficit culture’, as I call it, is tiring and depressive for persons that take responsibility seriously. There is no way to keep up with all there is to do. We can react or ignore but have little time to reflect.
I have mentioned before Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” It means that the form of a medium “embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.“ I think this thought applies with the new digital media. Media like Facebook, text messages or Twitter is brief, flashy, and superficial like how some people perceive the messages.
Some of this new digital media runs contrary to my basic philosophy that almost all we need to know is within us. The digital media says there are always more information and opinions to consider. How do we practice Martin Luther King’s or Gandhi’s expression to “speak truth to power” when the very idea of a truth in the message of this media is relative?
Notice I made every sentence in this post 140 characters or less (not counting spaces) so you could tweet it.
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