I think we’re beginning to see a time of darkness when, amid a plethora of high tech connectivity, one-quarter of Americans say they have no close confidante, more than double the number twenty years ago. It’s a darkening time when we think togetherness means keeping one eye, hand, or ear on our gadgets, ever ready to turn into another channel of life, when we begin to turn to robots to tend to the sick and the old, when doctors listen to patients on an average for just eighteen seconds before interrupting, and when two-thirds of children under six live in homes that keep the television on half or more of the time, and environment linked to attention deficiencies. We should worry when we have the world at our fingertips, but half of Americans age eighteen to twenty-four can’t find New York state on a map and more than 60 percent can’t similarly locate Iraq
–Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2008), page 22
(italics added)
Leave a Reply