The Next Time Someone Says Twitter Is Killing Deep Thinking With Short Quick Messages, Show Them This

from the history-repeating-itself dept

It seems like we keep hearing people insist that the internet, and things like Twitter and Google, are making us dumber because we're no longer really delving into anything with any depth, but rather just finding and spreading short snippets of text. There's never been any real support for that concept, but leave it to good old xkcd to put it all in perspective with a bunch of historical quotes that show people saying basically the identical things more than a century ago. TL;DR: People have pretty much always insisted that "back in the day, we spent much more time thinking/digesting/experiencing" and that "the kids these days just rush around." Maybe, just possibly, that's not actually true. Perhaps it's just that, as we all get older, time seems to move much faster, and the complaints are really people who are getting older (and, yes, this includes me) recognizing that we can't always keep up.