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>Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. real quotes from late 19th/early 20th century: https://xkcd.com/12
by TremendousJudge 7y ago
>Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds.
real quotes from late 19th/early 20th century: https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/
>With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel ... leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them... The hurry and bustle of modern life ... lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day's work done, took their ease...
>So much is exhibited to the eye that nothing is left to the imagination. It sometimes seems almost possible that the modern world might be choked by its own riches, and human faculty dwindle away amid the million inventions that have been introduced to render its exercise unnecessary.
- Invictus0 7y agoI know people that cannot go 60 seconds without picking up their phone, with no purpose except to check for notifications that aren't there and then put it back down. Reposting a list of quotes from the past has no bearing on the present reality where people are really struggling to focus.
- authoritarian 7y agoYou say that "a list of quotes from the past has no bearing on the present reality" and then go on to say that "people are really struggling to focus" which is essentially the same point, or at least closely related, that the quotes from the xkcd are making. Why are you acting like the quotes are unrelated when they support what you're saying?
- Invictus0 7y agoI think you're misunderstanding why OP posted the quotes. The quotes are mocking people that say that technology is making it harder for people to focus, because a hundred years ago people said the same thing about books and the telegraph etc.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoMaybe that’s when the slide started...