The View From the Fishbowl

It wasn’t so long ago that saying someone had the mind of a goldfish was an insult. But long ago is long gone now, and I fear that we’ve lost the upper fin: goldfish, with all of nine seconds of undisrupted thought, have finally bested humans on the reprehensible list of impossibly short attention spans. So here we are, left in the wake, sulking and wondering how we got here. Wait, hold that thought, someone just reTweeted my Tweet. @last #couldntcareless

Regardless of the actual time that can be attributed to the average American’s attention span, what can be said is that it’s pathetic. Now, I’m not saying I’m immune to the allure of information at my fingertips, nor am I saying that it’s necessarily evil. The point I’d like to make is one of moderation, primarily, by way of personal example.

When I sit in a lecture of 200 students for introduction to Media Writing, I can’t help but notice the plethora of students around me who are browsing the Internet. Students are not just reading articles, but rifling through Tumblr, and Facebook, and Twitter, and Buzzfeed, and Reddit, and YouTube, and Amazon, like gatling gunners who never stop to reload. I understand some of these topics aren’t interesting to everyone, but paying over $10,000 a year seems like a steep price for the first comment on which celebrity your friend’s vomit most resembles. Those websites aren’t responsible for your well-being. You are. If you think class is boring, wait until those subpar grades get you a subpar job with subpar pay that doesn’t afford you enough time or money to balance survival and social life. Take it from me, a man returning to school at 27 years old after a seven-year hiatus in the real world. The real world doesn’t care about how many Facebook friends you have, how witty your Tweets are, or what you ate for lunch.

There’s nothing wrong with being social, especially since the age of technology has granted us the privilege of staying in touch with the world we can’t always physically reach. But fellow students, hard work yields results and that takes concentration. If you’re bored in class, find the patience. Reward yourself with something enjoyable at intervals if you can’t make it all at once. Goldfish Crackers perhaps? Recognize you have the potential to do and say great things in life if you step outside 140 characters. In the words of the great Latin poet Horace, carpe diem. Or maybe more appropriately, in the words of modern rapper Drake, YOLO. Take heed now and you’ll be thankful later in life that you’re not looking out from the confines of a glass tank that’s too small for you, asking a plastic deep sea diver where you went wrong.