Strategically Communicating

” Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski, ” Nicholas Carr writes in his book The Shallows. Is it really fair to blame lack of ones attention solely on technology?  I simply don’t believe that’s true. It is not the Internet we need to fear, but the demands of our society. Life in the 21st century, in the west particularly, is about efficiency. It is about accomplishing more in less time. It is this problem that makes us jump from one page to another in search of quick answers so we can get on to the next thing on our list. Therefore, we settle for quantity over quality and with no time for digestion, thorough analysis is out of question. As an example, lets look at this very reading. As a graduated student, I am expected to finish this book in two weeks while also attending to other academic and life obligations. Am I going to scan it or read every page of it? Do I have time to dive deep into the concepts and discourses? While I would love to, I simply don’t have the luxury of time. The shortness of our attention span and our dependency on the Internet is less a problem of cyber take over and more a matter of our society’s intensified hunger for economical “upward mobility”.

So the question is, how do we find the balance?