(Nov 4, 2017 04:34 PM)Yazata Wrote: Something I've noticed is that attention spans seem to have been getting shorter as modernity 'progressed', to the point where we may arguably be approaching a reductio-ad-absurdem.
In medieval times, books were hand-written and were rare treasures. Even the biggest libraries might have only possessed a few hundred books. So when people acquired a book, they would read it over and over, often memorizing it word-for-word.
Then the printing press was invented and bookshops appeared. Scholars acquired their own personal libraries and might have owned as many as a thousand books, most of which they hadn't even read. Obviously the amount of attention devoted to each individual book went down dramatically.
Then the computer and the internet appeared and people gained access to instant information on practically anything. Except now it was dribbled out paragraph-by-paragraph. (For all the excitement about e-books, do you ever see people actually reading from screens like you once saw people reading paper books on the commuter train or in cafes?)
And today, the internet is funneled through the tiny screens of cell phones. (I'm one of the dwindling aging few who still use a laptop.) But my sense is that "millenials" get almost all of their information through their phones. So today's knowledge and learning have become a sentence-by-sentence thing.
I haven't attended a university for a long time. Do they even assign books any more? (Academic bookstores are disappearing, even in college towns.)
So I wonder about the ability of kids of today to follow difficult extended arguments.
reactionary social adaptation... ?
roughly speaking around 10 years is the time span of the unknown income/job...
Thus changing technology, changing soo fast the ability to syudy certain generic skill sets to attain a job for atleast 20 years is almost unheard of.
add to that outsourcing of manual labour level skill sets.
add to that mechanisation of production systems...
leaving a question for the teenager looking at university(because universityis basically compulsory now to get a job)...
what to study ? how long can i afford to study something before i must change and study something else ?
what part does this play in the educational system time line ?
sure doctors and such like technical profesions maintain their independance, however, many other things simply are not possible once you wait more than around 3 to 5 years...
thus by the time you get your degree you must start work immediately to stay on the income path.
add to that a generic move away from social support systems of government...
we are left with the potential of mechanisation moving a majority of people into the unemployed position with no actual jobs for them.
Balancing this is probably too complicated for the average Ego-centric political candidate.
"what i want right now is"
"what i need from you right now is"
"what I need right now is"
very much the current ideological paradigm of modern authority models, generically in a globally advertised state...
neo-individualism ?
alt-right-ism ?
neo-fringe-self-righteousness ?
... a sense of need for immediacy which is rienforced by heralded flag points ?
it appears to be a connundrum of social/species evolution
how does one keep up to a point where you may be ahead of everyone else so you may get the job ?
a question that would be very present in millenials & more soo the generation behind them.
Thus, why i suspect(speculate the possibility of) a new age of phillosophy and/or Religion-ism as a potential to contemplate the bigger questions which govern the entire society.
... is there a current counter to this already in operation ?
a sense of assumed authority of knowledge to try and circumvent the actual need to keep learning at an ever increasing scope & pace ?
(Nov 4, 2017 06:03 PM)C C Wrote: (Nov 4, 2017 10:42 AM)RainbowUnicorn Wrote: (Nov 4, 2017 01:39 AM)C C Wrote: Also called iGen. Since the XYZ approach for this coeval naming has reached the end of the alphabet, maybe they can use that to justify calling the next bunch Generation-J.
you are aware of the irony of the use of the X to name the generation? do you suggest J as the poor educational replacement of G for Genome ?
"J" just facetiously follows the "i" of iGen (iGeneration). Though since they're now at the dead-end with "Z" and would need to reload somewhere in the alphabet to continue any jargon designation by letters, maybe the humorous possibility isn't that unlikely.
Douglas Coupland's last incarnation of Gen-X (it was a label intermittently used in decades before the 1990s) is what triggered the X-Y-Z naming sequence (i.e., the latter two don't fall out of anything but that, even if jargon-izers were to belatedly choose words for Y and Z to be extracted from).
The earliest use of "Baby Boomer" (as something distinct from just a "baby boom") might or might not date back to as late as the Dec 1977 issue of "The Bennington Banner". But Gertrude Stein's introduction of the original "Lost Generation" for those born around the turn of the 20th century establishes the trend for naming coetaneous populations long before both "Baby Boomer" and the alphabet trend. Accordingly, the next stage of the process could just abandon the letters approach altogether (generations X, Y, and Z have parallel titles à la the vintage way, anyhow -- it never ceased).
- - -
Thanks, i see.
I guess there is a sense of the human intellect to attempt to re-invent its self.
self actuation as a driving force behind a teenage mind is probably a evolutionary need as much as a lever for new invention.
Oct 31, 2017 01:08 PM
