Thursday, 19 July 2018

Attention deficit disorder is the order of the day

Attention deficit disorder is the order of the day from many young people now. It is a fact of life in the educational system, the inability - or the unwillingness, or both - to focus for the sake of scholastic and social and personal success haunts the classroom. The young and the old are the canaries in the Anthropocene coal mine, our sentinel species.-  Stephen Jenkinson



I have noticed over the years the lack of concentration that people now have (and I include myself here), technology obviously has a role in this but I am interested in Jenkinson’s view on how memory is being lost. Not only in the individuals but also in society, as if it is not important and by extension technology is all we need. This is the drift towards AI however what happens to our humanness?

I also see that part of being human is our ability to be musical, be that singing or playing an instrument. Jenkinson’s view is that we are becoming increasingly sick in our minds, losing our memory and this is evident in both the young and the old thus showing a change in the ecosystem. Sentinel species in the world at large show environmental change, butterflies for instance will decline or increase with subtle changes in the ecosystem. For us the young and the old are the first to show signs of change. We have already travelled far down this road but things are accelerating now, we may have already reached and maybe even passed the tipping point.

Everything that has abundance devalues; information, music, and food have all become degraded, lacking in spirit and sustenance. It is the postmodern nightmare that all things are relative and there is no such thing as truth, just an abundance of information, this is given us Trump, Putin and Brexit.

We need to develop something that is old, an old skill an old technology, make music and make songs that tell stories, myths or epics that engage the mind and bring back memory remember the stories that our ancestors believed had to be told continuously otherwise the world would stop, may be it has, maybe we need to restart it.



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