Word Press
We’re all at it. Consuming little sound bites of information, commenting on a five second headline and waiting for friends to chime in with the missing links. That’s assuming it’s a conversation at all. It might just as well be several friends or lesser known acquaintances responding to a Facebook status. I’ve come across the topic of rapid information consumption a few times but increasingly it seems couched in voices of concern. Since I’m so conditioned to skim reading it can feel like a guilty pleasure to sit and read while not technically accomplishing anything. I’m not sure when luxury reading was downgraded on the priority list but I’d say the rot set in during broken sleep and midnight baby feeds when I’d sit in a dimly lit room rocking a hungry, fractious child flicking through baby magazines. I was soon lamenting that I was actually only capable of reading magazine columns or the very shortest of short stories. Half started novels gathered dust – (to think I used to keep three or four on the go) - or entire chapters would have to be re-read just to pick up the plot line again. Right after ‘baby brain’ lost its official grip, I was presented with a new nail in the coffin in the form of an iPhone. Now I could scroll through news links and Facebook banter at any time and it soon replaced the stretch as a five second mental break from ‘serious work’. The rabblerousers are calling us out on our shrinking attention span, and they may have a point. Last week I was mocked for simultaneously surfing the internet and poring over a catalogue during a family movie night. (Alright, maybe I wasn’t taking this whole family movie night seriously enough but we were watching a Disney version of Planet Earth and I am certain I have seen cute polar bear cubs fall over themselves in any number of BBC productions before.) This has so much become my standard approach to movie viewing that I’m more likely to settle in with my phone, laptop, and credit card than a bucket of popcorn. Apparently, relaxation is a dying art. All atwitter with Facebook communiqués and the instant gratification of texting, it seems redundant, or even lazy, to limit ourselves to merely one task at a time. The local news ran a story about teen addiction to texting. A Pew Survey found teen brain scans responded to a new text reply with a sudden release of the feel-good chemical dopamine. All hail instant gratification! But what about the thirty and forty somethings out there texting? Shouldn’t scientists should be worried about us? Teens can say “um” and “like” an inconceivable number of times in a sentence and still remember what they were talking about by the time they get to the end. For more mature texters, a new reliance on symbol-stuffed and vowel-disemboweled words (‘disemvoweled’) for texts and phone-based shopping lists may be doing untold damage....
24, at the Chatham Township Municipal Building, 58 Meyersville Road, Chatham Township. In addition to viewing original artwork and photography there will be and more »
Pen pals Ida Vsetula of Chatham, Ont., left, and Anne Dennis of Stephenville, right, are seen with Vsetula's sister Myra Yakubovich, who made the trip to
The Express-Times' Unknown Scribe breaks down Week 2 of area football actionHackettstown at Chatham -- Tigers coach Tony Villante said he's spreading out the field out to take advantage of his team speed. Sounds convincing to me.
