Busyness
Talking with someone from the Columbia Basin Alliance for Literacy (CBAL) about today's deteriorating use of the English language on electronic devices - from there spilling over into online/hard-copy news-publications - particularly readers' commenting! - even academic papers OMG! Seeping into verbal communication as truncated snippets LOL! With editing to keep it clean frequently gone. I figure she would be the one to talk with about it: she's teaching (computer-)literacy. Her immediate response: Today everybody's sooo busy. Why would everybody's routine be busier today than it used to be, I ask.
So busy with what OMG!
Unless it's because you're making yourselves available - and expecting others to - at all times, in any situation: through smart phones, pads and laptops. Im/compulsively swapping largely emotional Spam.
While without this 24/7 superficially convenient availability you would be far less busy than you are today. More rested, less fragmented, better organized: more productive. Not to forget less dead LOL from driving into stuff!
When all gets to be too too much, messages waiting and all: your portable just may spontaneously combust - which supposedly happened to a guy in South Korea. I can see it! Exploding brains! Yes! LOL!
The smaller (more portable) the device - the greater the probable distraction: expressing itself in often unfocused back-and-forth. Tiny screens with info in tiny bits - in a field of vision inescapably filled with a lot of world around them. Surely necessitating much clarification-but-no: much too busy you need to choose and simply do not reply - even delete - game over!
BTW worth mentioning and never before: what with these portables doable anywhere and the toilet a favorite refuge of relative calm from life as you know it: you wash your hands after, but do you wash your portable? In fact - do you ever?
No shit EW!
Anyway - in generally connecting electronically - you're not talking (in) much depth any longer - and few expect it. OMG! Becoming an issue on PCs as well - even though there having enough space to expound. Dumbing-down each other - this usually facilitated by your smarter-than-you minders' structural strings attached.
And apps!
Be appy!
On and on you go - not so much busy as prompted-busy. While promising to help organize your busyness: the clutter of always more must-have apps now possible to be managed with apps specific to managing just your apps-clutter. Like by a big brother who really really understands you LOL!
Flying thumbs tapping buttons in endless sequences. With more and more of you lining-up to buy the latest. Hooked on it, them - and signing-up on yet another site to be please-look-at-me noticed. Neediness among an astonishing multitude cleverly imprinted, nourished with promises of belonging. Friends, Likes, Thumbs Up - especially only just for you! And others similarly challenged. Killer-games simulating personal power - take-that! revenge a favorite. All living within the same illusory support-system.
How comfy is that LOL!
While your tiny-print agreements signed, sealed and delivered you to the same very Big Brother's now-and-future wiles. You are on sale and resale down the rabbit-hole!
As one teensy price to pay for all this: invisible, untouchable, unfeelable-so-far rays nudge your brain while you're in Sorry-but-I-really-must-get-this! mode OMG!
At Stanford University computer sciences are the top: every upstart wants to start a start-up to give specifically you and only you more app-choices: appealing to anyone from silliness-geeks to medical-care providers. There are about 97.000 apps for the latter alone.
For many of these upstarts there's the - purely coincidental, of course - buy-out billionaire-overnight thing LOL.
In The Beginning ...
There were specific times and places for electronic info-transfer of word, image, motion and sound. The proverbial time and place for everything. The fixed location of a very heavy desk-top; a large screen for graspability in total; fingerpad-size keys; a comfortable chair.
Power on - get it done - power off - walk away - time-out!
In time-out you had a sociable network. With less time now because the desk-top shrank/morphed dramatically to become movable: much of your sociable network has flat-lined into the so-called social network OMG!
Listening/Reading-Comprehension
Back to CBAL. Years ago I took their training to become a language-mentor for newcomers. Most important - to me - in this training was looking at two kinds of listening/reading-comprehension:
knowledge-based and information-based.
Knowledge-Based
Material presented in a two-way (on devices, too) filters through the receiver's prior familiarity with it: actual or imagined, guessed - pretended. Possibly limited, probably subjective. With a response then from within those parameters - not necessarily rooted in the material as presented, not to-the-point OMG! Miscommunication. Ships passing in the night. Misunderstanding. Stuck.
Reading "static" information - as reader coming from the same place - leads you to superficial absorption/digestion of it and ultimately inappropriate decision-making.
Look familiar?
EW!
Information-Based
You are open to the material/opinion presented. Wanting to understand fully - then communicate appropriately. Objectively. With intention, focus.
And all the time it takes!
You have 1 new message:
Affective/effective communication of constructive information
LOL!
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paperest.com
filterforge.com
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