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In his  On the Square  today , Russell E. Saltzman considers the fickleness of a member of the rising generation in the Internet Age:

For the generation ahead of him, Facebook is still the social media choice. But his generation (I remember that phrase being used a lot) doesn’t like reading all the words showing up in status updates.

On Facebook, he observed, picture this, people go on for “paragraphs and paragraphs.”


As a culture, we are losing memory and shortening our attention spans, Saltzman argues:
Instant communication was supposed to connect us more intimately, wasn’t it, and here we are, apparently drifting further apart. I cannot think this is good, scrunching our conversations down to so little. Our shriveling discourse with one another, our ever shorter exchanges and undeveloped rim-fired speculations: Is this how we seemingly have come to talk past each other? If that is happening with the small topics, what is happening with the big ones?

Read the full column here .


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