…and MySpace, and texting, and surfing the net on my phone, and getting sports updates, and…
There is no question that people under thirty have been raised with much more exposure to technology, and that they are more comfortable with using multiple mechanisms to communicate with each other. They are used to having more information at their fingertips, and in general “multi-tasking” more than any previous generation.
While there is significant discussion about how this impacts social life, or learning styles and patterns, in this post I want to focus more on what it may mean in terms of potential for enlightenment.
A core skill of for attaining increased awareness and the peace that comes with it is having time for contemplation, to focus. We turn our attention inward. Today, much of our attention is increasingly drawn outward, as the world demands that we “pay attention” to it.
In the process of doing that, we leave not time for concentration practice and the developed mind that results. Instead of being able to cultivate depth, we are spreading the focus on mind more and more thinly across the surface. It is the ultimate sacrifice of quality to quantity.
There is a school of thought that younger people, having been raised with more technology, have habituated to it, and therefore may not suffer the adverse affects of not having time for quiet mind, or the skills to cultivate quiet mind.
It seems more likely that technology is outstripping the speed at which the human brain has evolved in its capacity to handle information, and that at some point we will have to consciously determine how we want to allocate those resources.
