Technology has changed the way we work and think. Everything is at the touch of a button and you can reach to anybody you feel like where ever they might be. It is a total boon. You can log on to orkut and scrap a friend or 'Hi!' to an old flame. The capacity to communicate has become so instant that now we don't think. We just do it. All the long mails that used to get exchanged in the earlier part of internet revolution are now getting reduced to one liners on social networking sites. The only longish mails that I receive nowadays is from US office. :)
I don't remember if I have received a paragraph of mail from someone in the last year. But I wonder if there has been a change in the attitude due to the advent of instant messaging culture? You just don't take any time to think and type what you have it in mind. We simply choose to blurt out whatever we are thinking.
When our species started, they used to think in terms of words. Words like 'apple' and 'orange'. These words just depict the final goal that the Neanderthal man had to reach. As we grew (as a species) the thought process started to develop, moving from words to sentences and finally to paragraphs and passages. But now I see a reverse trend happening when we are moving in the reverse direction. The speed at which we communicate has surpassed the time taken to arrive at a conclusion and therefore we have become 'momentary thinkers'. Our opinion on an issue is dependent only one the last person who talked to us. (It doesn't take him time to convince us.)
When I look at the available literature I find not only good books written by scholars but letters and diaries of great men. I wonder if our generation will be able to come up with such kind of stuff. At least I don't foresee anything like Nehru's letters to his daughter or letters by Feynman in the book shelves. I am worried if we will have any thought leaders among us.
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Doris Lessing (Nobel Prize 2007) echoes the same feeling when she says 'we live now in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned, and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers’.
Its nice to see great people agree.
I don't remember if I have received a paragraph of mail from someone in the last year. But I wonder if there has been a change in the attitude due to the advent of instant messaging culture? You just don't take any time to think and type what you have it in mind. We simply choose to blurt out whatever we are thinking.
When our species started, they used to think in terms of words. Words like 'apple' and 'orange'. These words just depict the final goal that the Neanderthal man had to reach. As we grew (as a species) the thought process started to develop, moving from words to sentences and finally to paragraphs and passages. But now I see a reverse trend happening when we are moving in the reverse direction. The speed at which we communicate has surpassed the time taken to arrive at a conclusion and therefore we have become 'momentary thinkers'. Our opinion on an issue is dependent only one the last person who talked to us. (It doesn't take him time to convince us.)
When I look at the available literature I find not only good books written by scholars but letters and diaries of great men. I wonder if our generation will be able to come up with such kind of stuff. At least I don't foresee anything like Nehru's letters to his daughter or letters by Feynman in the book shelves. I am worried if we will have any thought leaders among us.
----
Doris Lessing (Nobel Prize 2007) echoes the same feeling when she says 'we live now in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned, and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers’.
Its nice to see great people agree.
