Impossible to Focus
Remember that tale of how Arjuna could see nothing other than the eye of the (wooden) bird he was aiming at? That was lauded by his guru as a sign of being focused on the task at hand. Or as Yoda from Star Wars said, “Your focus is your reality.” Today, staying focused is so very hard, because the “tide of technological revolution” that the philosopher Martin Heidegger warned about in the 1950’s is pounding us with tsunami after tsunami of data, e-mails, Facebook updates, tweets and WhatsApp messages all the time. But not everyone feels this is a bad thing. Like Rob Horning who described how Internet consumption has changed his writing : “I’ve grown incapable of researching as preparation for some writing project — I post everything, write immediately as a way to digest what I am reading, make spontaneous arguments and connections from what is at hand. Then if I feel encouraged, I go back and try to synthesize some of this material later. That seems a very Internet-inspired...