I passed someone last night in the mall, heading for the card store to see if 'they' had 'any Earth Day' cards left. Today is Earth Day, so I'm not sure if anyone makes a Happy BELATED Earth Day card for those who didn't think about this until day before. I also wondered about counter-intuitive, since most of us receive a card, read it, and then throw it away. It's the last part In connection with Earth Day observances I would find interesting until someone showed me a shiny object and then I'd be distracted. I've teased a lot about my own diminishing attention span and how it has changed--I SAID I WAS TALKING ABOUT, jeez! Concentrate willya? It's not always about you. ;-)
Sorry. I've never had the chance to do that before and couldn't resist. Besides it underscores my point which was….oh yeah, how attention spans are growing shorter no longer from generation to generation, but within a generation. Killian and company, spin merchants of the first order in the opinion of many (especially themselves) have assembled a funny, though simultaneously sad, white paper on line (making it an ether paper, I think) entitled, The Post-Literate Era: Planning Around short Attention Spans. It's not a very long or a difficult read but it is a little scary.
I'm not a big math guy (I'm not even a little math guy, come to think of it) but 120 minutes is a lot more than seven and those are the minutes we spend, on average, watching TV and reading (slow down and up the count, okay?). As you'll realize, the Killian folks look at all of this through the prism of who they are (persuasion professionals) and how they can better do what they do for their potential clients. Considering how good they are, I'm more grateful everyday the guys at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue kept their Vision of a New World Order in house and didn't hire these guys to hawk it to me. Where would I have put all those WMD pogs and ball caps?
So are we really living longer or does it just feel like we are because we're not paying attention? I'm not sure we have the time for a discussion on this, or even the interest. I attend one or more municipal meetings a week and in practically every one there is a moment when you see it on the faces in the front of the room, people lose the thread of the meeting, and have lost sight of whatever point the speaker is/was/trying to make. We keep moving forward during these meetings, because this brain cramp doesn't happen to everyone at the same time.
It's not just local politics-watch C-SPAN (go ahead, I dare you) when the house members stand up in front of the locked-down camera 'late in the evening' though the speeching always makes me think of zzz's rather than the letter before k. We at home have no way of knowing (because the cameras aren't allowed to zoom in or out, pan or tilt in any way (=move)) how many are actually in the House or Senate chamber when your elected representative launches into his Tale of Brave Ulysses, but sometimes the speaker is dangerously close to being carried out on his shield than carrying it himself, so to speak.
We can do it at home, to one another. In your next conversation with your spouse, your child, yourself in the mirror just try to keep track of where the starting point of the conversation was, and where you ended up. Sometimes it's the journey and sometimes it's the destination. To be somebody or to do something. In life you have to make a decision: to be or to do. And Spike Jones wanted to sue TNN? Wait'll Milligan gets here. And Peter, Blake called and said keep your day job.
-bill kenny
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