"People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas." This is a quote by Orson Welles. It's scary to think that he saw this happening decades ago. I wonder what he would think now, after seeing people interacting with the internet with 145-word long tweets and six-second vines?
To me, attention spans seem to be getting shorter. Possibly, the large number of children with ADD may have a direct correlation with the amount of TV that they watch and the lack of reading that they do, or don't do. I don't know about you, but I can usually tell if a person is a reader or not by just speaking with them for about five minutes. What the people choose to talk about, the phrases they use, and the questions they ask are all clues to me. I suspect that the people who read less are likely the people Welles was talking about wit his quote above. I think one of the best things that I have done for my girls is to limit their ability to watch TV. Now that Maddie is older, I find she uses the internet to watch short videos and to speak with her friends. The more time she spends doing this, the less time she has to read books. I worry about this since it could impact her ability to think in the future. Is my worry unfounded? I don't know, and that is what scares me. I guess what I worry about is that the world is changing rapidly. As our technology improves, information is literally at out finger tips. While I believe this is a good thing, I wonder how many people will take advantage of this huge opportunity. While I spend a lot of time on line, I also find the time to read one or two regular books a week. I wonder how many other people do this? I hope that it is many people, although I suspect that it is not. It has been said that the only constant is change. Mankind has gone through changes in the past, and I believe we will continue to change going forward. While a large number of people seem to be losing their capacity for critical thinking (probably not true by the way), New things are constantly being discovered and created. Thus, there still seems to be a great number of people that can listen, follow ideas, and think critically. For centuries, the brunt of mankind have not made the vast discoveries that have moved the human race forward. In fact, most of the population has seemed content to just live and survive and allow others to make the important discoveries. The few have always made the great discoveries. What is important is that no one line has made all of the discoveries. People from all walks of life have made discoveries, These discoveries are then added to mankind's achievements, and are then improved upon by others. I am optimistic that this process will continue in the future as well. As more and more discoveries are made, new people will discover new ways to use the information and push mankind forward. We do not need millions of radical thinkers for this process to work. But I imagine that more progress would be made if more people took the time to learn how to think critically.
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