Are we becoming a mindless and flickering society?

An interesting presentation in ‘ Slideshare ‘ about the decreasing levels of attention span of human beings with the advent of internet and social networks is the inspiration in this post. Initially I tried to find evidence negating this observation. May be we can rephrase it by saying that we are becoming connected to so many things, be it physical or cognitive. This creates a kind of cognitive overload such that we tend to be having lesser focus on an idea. Still we cannot completely be pessimistic about this happening. Why is it so?

This presentation made me ponder on the two directions. It is true that our attentions pan is diminishing at a fast pace and we may become a mindless or a spinning mind generation. At the same time, we are become more connected and innovative and versatile in our professional and personal lives. This is because of the parallelism in our ways of thinking. At the same time, it is always good have the capability to think about the deeper aspects.

Is moving away from devices, terminals and computer interfaces a viable thing, even if supposed to be ideal? Not necessarily. Buddhism says that emptying out the mind is a way out from the mindless ways of life and various methods of meditation offers a remedy to this. How can we think of meditating with devices and our life patterns? Writing habits and physical activity at workplace is a good solution to this challenge. This is not a comprehensive or universal solution. You need to choose this based on your creative and physical prowess.