Brain Shrinkage

According to this report, all our multitasking, especially on social media, is shrinking our brains. This lends new meaning to the phrase, “dumbing down.”

Given that we live in a 21st century world that demands that we attend to multiple things at once—how do we at least keep some of this at an arm’s length, or at least fortify ourselves and temper some of this “shrinkage”?

While it might be grand (or overly dramatic) to demand that you “kill your TV,” I’m guessing that solution isn’t one that most people are going to opt for. However, you might cut your television viewing—I’ve been working at it for the last month and it’s really not that bad. After 29 days of no television, Miss Mary and I watched a classic movie starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert Sunday night. I think we might limit our viewing to TCM on Sunday nights. Continue reading

Times Like These

Technology and everything associated with it has exploded and gone viral. The genie has exited the bottle and there’s no way to put him back.

The recent exponential growth of tools like social media, and the transition from what began as Web 1.0, or the first generation tools beginning with the Internet, which produced a static web, has rapidly transitioned to and through Web 2.0. Web 2.0 introduced interactivity via blogging and brought us to and beyond the social networking of Facebook, which most of us are now so familiar with. With the compression of exponential change into shorter and shorter bursts, we’ve entered the next realm of growth wrought by mobile technology, mainly smartphones and Web 3.0. Continue reading