Fish are Better Listeners than We Are   

This past week in class we hit many different and interesting points. My personal favorite was that most people have an attention span that is less than that of a gold fish which means that if you want to vent you better find a fish because they’ll listen longer than your favorite human pal. The gradual loss of our total attention span has been associated with the evolution of technology. Since the social media age we have constantly been bombarded and attacked at all sides by distractions and constant fear of missing out on the next big trend. This has in turn caused us to constantly change tasks as we seek to stay up to date with the lives of millions of people. All this divided attention has led to a dip in productivity due to the fact that the human mind can’t focus on two tasks at once and give its best effort for both at the same time. What this means is that every time you check your phone at work your productivity is suffering which can have very real effects in real world with termination of employment being the worst. The fact that information is always so readily available to us is also causing us to take less time remembering important facts such as names and phone numbers which could have lasting consequences for us if we were to lose access to this information somehow. This brings us to the next interesting topic that we briefly discussed and that was what would happen if we lost all the information on the internet. This is a scary thought for most people due to the fact that without the internet we would lose most of our identities. We wouldn’t have access to most of our money and chaos would run rampant right after the blackout. A Netflix show that I watched that was somewhat similar to this plot is called Revolution and in it electricity went away and it was enough to break the U.S into tiny factions of rogue nations. I could see this reality happening if the internet went dead. There may even come a time when everything does go dead and hopefully we will be able stand together to help each other survive. All these thoughts have made me realize that we need to be able to separate ourselves from the digital world because it has real world implications if we don’t and there may be a time when we have to.