I have a couple questions to think about for today…
First off, I have seen the pace of media change since I was young…maybe it is the influence of MTV in the early 1980’s, but movies, TV shows, news programming, and almost all other forms of media and expression seem to have become increasingly more disjointed, chopped, and generally…shorter. To me, this calls to mind one of those chicken/egg dichotomies, in that have these forms of content merely responded to our needs (i.e. a shorter attention span), or has this helped make us need these smaller chunks of information?
To be honest, either possible answer in this question has about the same result…that we, as a society have shorter attention spans than out grandparent had is not really that debatable. Why this has taken place is, however, interesting.
Is having an aggregate shorter attention span a result of living in a culture which values innovation? Has the increasing rate of change and general societal flux made having shorter attention spans an actual survival mechanism?
I don’t have any answers here…and there are, most likely, a lot more question about this new feature in life.
For the second question for today, I have a broader idea to consider, albeit a possible less important one.
If you look back on the broad panorama of human history, it has been the convention to see a number of specific times and places as unique ‘eras’. I have no argument to make about this ‘convention’, but if you were to take this as a given, there are aspects of these societies which make them unique. Amongst the first things we think about as unique in these eras…art comes to mind.
Specific works of art elicit much of what we feel and think about these eras. For instance, looking at a da Vinci, or a Rembrandt, listening to Beethoven, or Stravinsky, reading Boccaccio, or Dickens are all distinct from each other, some of it by virtue of these preconceived perspective s we may carry with us.
So…my question is that specific art forms and methods are part of these eras. If you were to try to factor out the influence of technology in human history (with regard to this notion) is there a residue which might reflect how some forms have fallen into neglect? As usual for these sorts of questions…there isn’t any real answer…these questions are seeds…
