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Quotation of the Day for April 17, 2015"There are thinkers who have compared [concentration] to a muscle that does get strengthened. But I think there are big cultural consequences to having that ability or not. I give the example of sitting down to read a challenging book, and after a page or so I'm getting antsy and I realize it's Tuesday night and my favourite TV show is on. So I turn it on and maybe that's for the best, because the next day I have some basis for chitchat with other people and I'm not a freak as I would have been if I'd been absorbed in Aristotle. But I think what that means is that we're becoming more similar to one another. "The ability to concentrate on things that aren't immediately engaging, or a lack of such ability, seems to be tied up with the question of whether intellectual diversity is going to persist or not. If we're all sort of tied into these sources of mass culture, then I think it does have a homogenizing effect." - Matthew Crawford, philosopher and author of the new book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. Submitted by: Terry Labach Apr. 14, 2015  |
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