Too much time spent in front of short attention span media like television, videos, social media posts, texts, twitters, gossip on cell phones, channel surfing, pausing and fast forwarding “through slow parts” of DVDs has got to be affecting our concentration and changing our relationship to information. In addition, the sheer amount of information available makes us feel knowledgable, maybe eve smart, but eclipses time for actually thinking, investigating, understanding, or using information. This is what David Foster Wallace called “Total Noise”
“the consumption [of which] tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that’s also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen”
Now it is impossible to absorb or make sense of all this information. This use to be called “narcotizing dysfunction”. The shear amount of information actually leaves us in a numb state, like a narcotic, high but affect-less. Learning become a matter of editing down and digging in.
