David Suissa: There’s no app for humanity

OHMYGOSSIP — Every time I turn around, I hear about a new app that promises to make my life easier, get somewhere faster, find things quicker. This is the golden calf of the digital era: speed. We’re desperate for any clever gizmo that will make things go quicker — including our brains.

But where is the app that will help me slow down and go deeper — the app that will help me appreciate complex ideas and encourage critical and creative thinking?

Apparently, that app will have to wait, because we have entered the post-thinking world.

In this blurry new world, the majority of people don’t read, so much as scan and skip; they don’t write, so much as tweet and text; they look down at their devices more than up at people’s faces; and yes, they think, but they think very, very quickly.

“We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily — even giddily — governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency and convenience,” author and literary editor Leon Wieseltier said in a speech to the graduating class of Brandeis University last month. “The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning — to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work.”

Author: David Suissa
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