You cannot have failed to realise that the world is changing at an ever faster rate, particularly in how we communicate with others. Gone are the days when you would send a nice long newsy letter in anticipation of an equally interesting and literary response from friends and family. No longer is a nice face-to-face chat enough to satisfy our collective need to keep in touch.
Undoubtedly, there is a lot more communication by a bewildering number of ways such as Email, texting (SMS), Facebook, Blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn with the accent on ever more telegraphic prose and brevity. It seems our collective time attention span is decreasing rapidly to the point where it is little more than that of a moth or goldfish. We seem to be going for quantity instead of quality of communications.
Even curling up and reading a good book is no longer the pleasure it was. Have you noticed any changes in how you think? Don’t you find it difficult to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds? Has your style of writing changed in recent times?
I don’t know about you but I am finding using pen and paper increasingly more out of tune with my creative mind processes. Instead I sit at my computer whizzing between emails, various websites, blogs and now tweets, cutting and pasting, re-arranging order of phrases and paragraphs, to do my research and come up with writing reports and articles.
It seems that I am not alone in this seeming dumbing down of my thought processes. From a fascinating anthology of essays entitled:” The Best of Technical Writing 2009” (ISBN 978-0-300-151410-8), journalist Nicholas Carr posed the question: “Is Google making us stupid?” He concludes from his exchanges of emails, blogs, tweets and the occasional face-to-face discussions with his friends and online acquaintances that the way we think has changed. He says:” My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles”. He goes on to say: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
Nicholas concludes by saying that medical science used to think that the human brain loses its ability to change its neuron “hard wiring” at adulthood. More recent research however, suggests that the brain is infinitely malleable for most of it’s life. Therefore, the way we think is being changed; it being conditioned by the new digital forms of communications.
Digital social networking is changing society itself. Just as the Industrial Revolution changed society for good, the 19th century, so the dawning of the Digital Age has set a social revolution in train. Where will it end and who will be left behind as social outcasts?
The author, Philip Norris, a keen observer of our life and times, is Principal Consultant and Managing Director of Norris Management Ltd. In a long and varied career, Phil has been a Programme and Project Manager for high profile projects in the Construction and Transportation fields. In recent years, he has provided much needed support as a management consultant to corporate and SME clients on the development of, the management of, team building and the employment of people in the workplace.
