Productivity + Digital

It's amazing how our productivity as a society has soared in this digital era.

Or has it?

True, we can now communicate faster than ever before, sometimes even faster than we can talk, or think. Before the words come out of our mouths they're tweeted. Maybe before the thought is even complete, it's retweeted. This is all well and good for a college student such as myself; I can update my blog while I'm walking home, send an email between classes, tweet an idea to my friends when I'm surrounded by strangers. I have, in my pocket, a device that can tell me just about anything there is to know and say whatever I want to everyone who is listening.

While this is all very exciting, I've still got grades to keep up—homework needs doing. When I find that I have to read not one, but TWO chapters of my text, my busy fingers pine at the thought of merely turning pages. My eyes weep at the monochromatic implications of reading a book that does not stir the senses. It's a waste of time. In the time that it will take me to read two chapters of a book, I could have created a whole website (thanks, Wix). And that makes me wonder: are we more productive?

I can't read a textbook without complaining to myself. What else can't I do? How else has the digital era lamed me? We're a young generation with a serious case of Alzheimer's. Each tidbit of info replaces the one before it, so that the things we learned this morning are forgotten by the afternoon. And when it burdens me to contemplate sitting down for an hour to wholeheartedly absorb information from a single, featureless source, I can't help but think that our capacity to acquire information has dulled our ability to learn.

Yes, I will read the book. Yes, I do like to read! Yes, I usually skip my reading assignments because I don't like doing assignments and I procrastinate. But it will sweeten the obligation to know that the words I read in this text will enrich my brain more than 20 Newser abstracts.