Bad Economy

The Dow just lost more points this week than in any other week in history. The economy is falling down around us and I guess that makes Ron Paul a bit like Chicken Little. In fact, we are so poor (How poor are we?) that we are even becoming unable to pay attention. I liked the pun there, I hope you did too. The linked article is a couple months old and it describes how the internet is destroying our ability to pay attention because we skim everything. I am just as guilty of this as everyone else. Probably more. I 'read' 130 newspapers a day. I don't actually sit down with a massive stack of paper and go page by page. Instead I check my RSS reader and scroll through headlines trying to find articles that interest me enough to read. I don't remember the last book that I read from cover to cover. I have seven books with marks in them right now because I have to read each of them one chapter at a time and switch to a different book to keep my mind engaged. Fortunately I am still able to watch an entire feature-length film; but that's not exactly exemplary is it? Do any of you actually read the full article I link to? Or do you just read my opinion about the article? This hit me recently when I was talking to someone about news. If you watch CNN you do get a lot of news, but 24 hours is a long time. After a while they stop giving news and start giving opinion. Opinion is not news. I am not a journalist I am a blogger.

I have asked people to pay attention to something for even a sentence before and that much concentration was painful. To think about trying to maintain a single stream of conciousness for a couple hours is almost beyond society's grasp. Can we stop this? Sure, we could. Will we? I don't know, what's on another channel?