The Pecan Park Eagle

Welcome to the United States of Autisia! In our land, Lady Liberty puts down that right arm and uses it to help hold the giant ipad she now snuggles safely on the left side in the featured photo. Then, with both hands holding the ipad in front of her for easy touch manipulations, she stares down at it all day as visitors to these shores pass merrily by her into the harbor.

What’s going on today with our shorter and shorter attention spans is essentially complicated by the process of what we are becoming as a culture as a result of our diminished, or re-wired, attention spans.

And what are we becoming? (I have to say this fast before I either lose your attention – or you lose mine.) …

1) a nation of people who only seem to care about contact with those items that come to each of them separately in digitally transmitted form on a 24/7 basis;

2) as a people with damaged awareness of our social or physical surroundings, we are rude and/or indifferent to others (“speaking” to an absent person digitally with our thumbs while we ignore the person who is on site with us); we are less considerate of how our behavior disturbs strangers (texting in movies); and we are unable to risk evaluate that driving a car and simultaneous texting are deadly dangerous partners;

3) we credit ourselves for our growing capacity for multi-tasking, but we dismiss the evidence that we are also learning to take less personal responsibility for own behavior in each little new area that we take on;

4) like the true autistic, we are seeing signs of serious impairment in our culture’s ability to promote healthy interaction and effective communication with others while we also give ourselves more and more to the kinds of compulsive and repetitive patterns of behavior that are the lifelines of digital pursuits like texting and tweeting;

5) this point is a question: What do we now call a body of several hundred autistics that we have gathered together for the sake of resolving our greatest national problems? Answer: Same as always, we call them Congress.

Welcome to the United States of Autisia!