Digital Attention Deficit Trait…

So this how people get alienated these days: by having too many digital connections with others. Says this article on Forbes.

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected–or more alienated

There is a lot of Klischee stuff in that article, but yet some good quotes:

The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures success by calls made, e-mails answered and messages responded to.

We live a contradiction: Insisting that our world is increasingly complex, we nevertheless have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted.

One thought, though, takes it a little over the top, I think:

One says, „I don’t have enough time alone with my mind“; another, „I artificially make time to think.“ Such formulations depend on an „I“ separate from the technology, a self that can put the technology aside so as to function apart from its demands. But it’s in conflict with a growing reality of lives lived in the presence of screens, whether on a laptop, palmtop, cell phone or BlackBerry. We are learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices. To put it most starkly: To make more time means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture. But this is not a simple proposition, since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and increasingly feel like extensions of our minds.

(found on the „cult of the amateur“ blog.)