catnip?

Lately I have been finding myself fascinated by this brief touching on the subject of "pseudo-modernism," which can be classified as one step beyond postmodernism. What intrigues me the most is how much it simply makes sense to me--this "pseudo-modernism" is, I think I could argue, present everywhere in today's society, so much so that we don't really notice it anymore, if we ever did. More than that, we're okay with it. I think I touched on this a little in my last blog on here, and this isn't really the focus of my writing this week, but I just wanted to bring that up a little bit.

It is very noticeable, the fact that we rely so much on the internet nowadays. Honestly, where would we be without Google? How convenient it can prove to be. Whenever we have the simplest question, we can just type a few key words into that nifty little search bar, and the world wide web will provide us with fifty billion different ways to explain an answer.

In some ways, I really do see this as a good thing. Information is more accessible now than it has ever been before, just waiting out there, waiting for someone to reach out to it and grasp with all their might.

However, the problem that I'm seeing is that we too often are lacking in this might. We can't always reach out, with purpose, and grab exactly what we need--or if we can, we can't use it for much anyways. Sure, we've got all this useless knowledge now, floating around in our brains, bouncing off walls, getting lodged in the folds of our cerebral cortex... But do we use it?

I don't know about these claims that humans only use 10% of their brains, but I do know for positive there is a lot of what we would call "knowledge" that sits in there, molding away, stored away one day never to be used again. Why is this? As I said, knowledge is plentiful, just asking us to snap it up. So we do. And we'll hold onto it for awhile, and never look at it again. Mostly because we just don't care.

All this random information just encourages us to skim about, shuffle through the piles and piles of things, read a few words here and there, perform a surface-level analysis or sorts and take a surface-level meaning out of it all. With so much around us, our eyes roll around in their sockets, our brains are overwhelmed, our synapses try to fire too quickly. We don't retain any of it, if we even pay attention that long: it's like going to an art museum, to use a crude sort of analogy. You stare at one painting for a few seconds--take a brief moment to wonder what it means--decide it's not worth your time--move on to the next one, only to repeat the process over and over again.

Short attention spans!!! It all comes down to short attention spans. Short attention spans bred from the quick-paced nature of today's culture--all of that "pseudo-modernism," as I already hinted. I'm not sure if anyone else will remember this--but two years ago, in Honors English 10, Ms. Bennett told us that the average teenager's attention span was 12 minutes long. About how long is this, in perhaps more relateable terms? Approximately the amount of time we watch a television show until the first commercial break.

We don't really notice this kind of thing, do we? But once we do, it starts to become a little disturbing. We start to wonder, what will happen to humanity if consciousness, as we know it, as our ancestors have known it for centuries and centuries, is ultimately shrinking?

I'd like to take a moment to add to this discussion a pondering of the structure of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle; I just finished the novel this morning and found it... intriguing, to say the least.

One of the first things I noticed when I first started reading was the unusual structure. When we read a novel in an English class, the first thing we expect tends to be archaic language, extended syntax--long, long, interminable chapters (these criteria call to mind works like The Scarlet Letter and Sense and Sensibility, and any of my fellow classmates over the past few years will admit that these bring back scary, scary memories...). This book is just about the opposite of all that.

So I'm beginning to wonder, did Vonnegut foresee the shrinking of human consciousness, as I put it? Did he expect an audience with an incredibly short attention span, who couldn't focus on a single scene for more than three to four pages? I think this might be one of the main themes of the novel as a whole. It moves at a fast pace--similar to today's society, the way we know it--quick, jagged in some places. It flits from scene to scene, time frame to time frame. It can be confusing.

But we can keep up. Maybe that's the point that I am trying to make. He wrote it for us, he expected us.

And if this is the kind of book that attracts us, with its short chapters and quick-pace--completely favorable to our facilitated ADD. We don't have to think so hard. It moves quickly. Chapters don't go on for an eternity. It's "just catnip to the kids" (Vonnegut 95).