New research suggests that today's 14 year old has the complex thinking ability that a 12 year old would have had a generation ago. This is blamed partly, if not entirely, on the short attention span which is encouraged by television & computer games etc
It is interesting to compare this with what JB Priestly wrote in 1972, roughly the same time that is now being compared with 2008:
We arrive now at the subject of attention.
Ours has been called the Age of Anxiety but it could also be called the Age of Necessary Attention. Outside our houses we have only to be inattentive to begin risking our lives - & other peoples. Even inside our houses or apartments there are probably all manner of appliances that cannot be left long unattended. We live in a world that demands more & more & closer & closer attention.
Nearly a century ago Bergson declared that our brains were largely instruments that had an inhibiting function, directing us to l’attention à la vie. Since then the immense development of technology, whether creating delicate instruments or racing cars & jet planes, has sharpened attention to a very fine edge. We are more & more aware of divisions of time that would have been meaningless to our forefathers.
When I first began recording for radio I was told Ten seconds from now, & this would have seemed utterly absurd to me sixty years ago, when I was already in my middle teens. (It is worth remembering that our forefathers travelled in stage coaches that left at dawn, noon or sunset, then trains brought in minutes – the 10.35 or the 4.26; and now on television screens, before some blast-off to the moon, we can see even seconds being split.)
I doubt if our ancestors could have understood a film, which is geared to our attentiveness. We can say that our present time, our personal now, has been so tapered that reality arrives through an increasingly narrowed slit
So we gain, perhaps more than we lose, from the speed with which we can change the focus of our attention
Would you like to be unable to understand a film?
