Our practices are reducing what enables us to understand others and the world around us.
I daily talk to people in university teaching. For two or three years a recurrent conversational theme has been short attention-spans. I've noticed that students are increasingly impatient with detailed explanations and less and less able to assimilate reading material. My impression is they skim rather than read.
I used to think attention-span problems were limited to those who prefer "sound bite" TV treatment of complex issues and assumed when people recognized the importance of an issue they paid attention. I used to think plot-less recent movies were just a matter of marketers catering to the lowest common denominator. From what I hear and have experienced myself, things are much more serious.
It seems the fascination with attention-dividing cell phones and other devices goes deeper and is having a greater impact than I thought. If you're trying to follow two or more conversations or series of events, you're not going to give any one enough attention.
And just as bad is that rather than looking at root causes, professionals who might make a difference are busy medicalizing the problem. Suddenly we have all sorts of attention-deficit disorders and syndromes. But the response invariably is to rely on pharmaceuticals rather than to change anything.
The ethical issue in what's happening to attention spans is that we're allowing an erosion of our capacity to communicate and understand. We're allowing it partly by ignoring the problem, partly by accepting easy answers that there are all these syndromes out there, and partly by our fascination with the causes of the problem: the latest technological gadgetry that we think we can't do without: cell phones, MP3 players, PDAs, handheld video, wireless internet... Add to this the reinvention of entertainment as a series of evermore striking but utterly transitory spectacles lacking any meaning other than shock value.
As a result, instead of resenting sound-bite news and event coverage and demanding some meaningful content, we grow increasingly impatient with any report that even begins to discuss complexities. We're impatient with anything we can't assimilate immediately, kidding ourselves that we understand.
What we're doing is as unethical as it gets because we're remaking ourselves downward; we're lessening ourselves. We're making ourselves less just as surely as if we deliberately closed our eyes and ears and minds to all information. And in the process we are becoming more and more self-absorbed and putting an ever greater stake in our precious opinions.
