Musings

Now that my blog quota for the course has been filled, I am free to muse as I wish to an audience no longer built in by course mandated requirement.  I therefore write to no audience and simply wander through my thoughts aimlessly, punctuated only by the soft click of the keyboard.  While the vastness of the Internet as a global community continues to grow, create, and evermore divide into itself, I imagine this blog to be washed away by the great tide of web-thought existing in cyberspace.

Doing two things at once has, in this day, become a skill highly coveted by many.  It finds itself redundantly typed onto millions of resumes and becomes a source of pride for those who appear to multitask effortlessly. Technology has served to only increase the number of tasks being minded simultaneously by an individual.   Many children of Canada can text, listen to their iPod, check Facebook, and do homework all at once, perhaps Seinfeld is even playing in the background.   University students often require multiple applications at once on their computers as they write papers and surf through endless databases of academic articles.  Is there something missed as we become engrossed in multiple technological tasks? Or are we still able to be fully aware of our surroundings – the dog pacing the hall to be let outside for example… my dog loves to pace! 

The professor argued that as we multitask (checking Twitter during a lecture is me multitasking at my finest) we miss a lot of pertinent information, but is this true? And if so, what are we missing? While technology allows us to navigate many avenues all at once does it deter our attention from a real time moment? Is the light of the moon on a bright winter night, as you stop to look up and admire, dimmed by the sound of a text to your phone, and then the app you downloaded to look up the moon phases?  Did we just miss something as our faces become illuminated not by the glow of the waxing moon, but by the light of the iPhone 4S?  Or are we enriched by our ability to perhaps engage, access, and appreciate all of it at once?