the exciting media and us

since I have been sick, I decided to spend this sunday morning reading something interesting and spend my time quietly. So I am reading the DIscovery magazine while listening to Ashkenazy play Bach's Well Tempered Klavier. An article triggered me to go over to discoverymagazine.com's blog section. I read down the blog trying to find what I was looking for when I stumbled on a link to Jon Stewart's take on the whole climate gate thing. Polarizing statements from idiotic republican senators aside, Stewart, as usual, is hugely entertaining and it reminded me of two of my pretty smart friends who watch the Daily Show, well.... daily.

I then went back to Bach and the Discovery magazine. Wow, it struck me how "blend" Bach is compared to Jon Stewart. I was shocked at that reaction. No wonder so few of us listen to classical music any more, or read a magazine like Discovery or the Economist.

We want to be entertained, our senses stimulated. Bach is great art, Stewart is amazingly entertaining and definitely packs in many more punches in 5 minutes than Bach can. Short punchy entertainment is what we need now, instant success, quick rise to fame. Short articles on the web, blogs, even better, twitter, drives us toward ever shorter attention span. Where are we headed?

If time is x, attention span = y where y = 1/x as x -> infinity. Maybe this formula isn't even correct since our attention span probably shortened a lot quicker in the last century than any century before it.

In an attempt to lengthen my attention span, am heading back to the Discovery magazine and Bach now......