A post by Neeraj pointed me to an interesting NY Times writeup called “The Twitter Trap“.

In it, Bill Keller describes his observations on the wonders of modern Technology, and how they impact our lives… sometimes, not so favourably.

I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, and I don’t think I’m a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that the Web reaches and engages a vast, global audience, that it invites participation and facilitates — up to a point — newsgathering. But before we succumb to digital idolatry, we should consider that innovation often comes at a price. And sometimes I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves…

My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?

By day, I lead a team that goes by the name of Business Solutions & Innovation, where we focus on leveraging Technology to improve customer engagement across a diversified range of financial services.  So, I am well acquainted with the benefits that Technology and Innovation offer.  But, I am also acutely aware of the downside.

Keller touches upon my fears in his essay, too: 

Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.

The choice of poison differs, but the consequences are the same – Email clients that sync every few minutes; Blackberry devices that show you that all-important (and not-so-important) message as soon as it arrives; Twitter and FB updates that refresh on your preferred screen every few seconds, and of course, every conceivable piece of information that is now just a “Google search” away… 

Increasingly, we are all growing up in a culture of instantly-available, always-on, information-overload. 

The “shelf life” of most of the stuff we encounter in today’s day and age is abysmally low – sometimes as low as a few seconds (a la Twitter).  And, by and large, we seem to be “okay” with that.  But, it’s leading to shorter (as in really, really short) attention spans, which demands even faster turnaround times from such mechanisms, further fuelling the viscious cycle!  And, it’s leaving us little time to digest much of the content we consume, which means that few of us are really “processing” any of the stuff we come across, let alone synthesize it with our own learnings and world views.

How would this affect how we view relationships?  How would we define “long-term” in the years to come?  How would this impact creativity – the art of creating something new by combining two seemingly-unrelated entities?  Will we lose all understanding of “delayed gratification”?  What would “learning” be like, in the next decade or two – when all information would literally be at our fingertips?!

I am convinced that if this continues – and it probably will – it will have long-lasting effects on the human race.  Like Keller, I also fear that we may be losing our most essential human qualities in the bargain.  And, that would be too high a price to pay for progress.