So the new of the day is that watching SpongeBob SquarePants causes attention problems in four-year-olds. My question is, "What's wrong with that outcome?" That is, why should one of my favorite cartoon characters be any different from the nightly news that I watch. America's nightly news programs routinely jump from one overly-sensationalized story to the next, offering snippets of information, including sound bites from what should be thoughtful and carefully crafted speeches. Between these "news stories," we are subjected to equally frenetic run of commercials. Most annoyingly, before departing from news to commercial we are given a teaser statement for what will be coming up "next," which is apparently newspeak for sometime before the end of the broadcast...maybe.
A short attention span may be just the thing these four-year-olds will need for keeping up with what's important in their future world. And when it comes to "waiting before eating snacks," why would we want to?
This goes right along with the information from Digital Nation about brains even becoming wired differently. Right? Wrong? Not sure, but what I do no is it ain't goin' away! So our challenge really is to prepare them (and ourselves) for the quick soundbite because I don't see the pace slowing down any. We either adapt or fall by the wayside?
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