Check out this incredibly insightful piece (‘Possibility Junkies’) offered up by Ken Myers (NPR veteran and holder of an MA in Religion from Westermister Theological Seminary), now the host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal commenting (over at Evangelical Outpost) on Mark Edmundson’s article “Dwelling in Possibilities,” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 14, 2008, but pretty much timeless)

[emphasis and links added]

[Edmundson] portrays his students as energetic anti-slackers, eager “to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they’ve ever known. . . . They live to multiply possibilities. They’re enemies of closure. For as much as they want to do and actually manage to do, they always strive to keep their options open, never to shut possibilities down before they have to.”

Edmundson believes that this voracious omnitasking makes the lives of his students both highly promising and radically vulnerable to living lives that leave no room for reflection and self-knowledge. “Our students rarely get a chance to stop. They’re always in motion, always spitting out what comes first to mind, never challenging, checking, revising.” In Edmundson’s view, the tyrants most responsible for this condition are not rigorous professors or even parents with unrealistic expectations. The tyranny is exercised in a mood of possibility enabled by web browsers and cell phones. These technologies are less about communication and more about enlarging desire. “Skate fast over the surfaces of life and cover all the extended space you can, says the new ethos”…

If Edmundson’s diagnosis of the ethos of our culture is accurate… if the absence of thickness, depth, and commitment encouraged by fast skating is really not in keeping with the shape of human flourishing, if there is something truly unnatural about this mentality, something in it that is not consistent with our nature, then we need to attend to the maintenance of counter-cultural institutions and practices. Reading and re-reading books, slowly, keeping personal and private journals (not public blogs [d'oh!]) which invite true introspection without the distraction of self-presentation, face-to-face conversations that linger and dwell, conversations that achieve some contrapuntal pleasure, attentive listening to musical works that require us to slow down and perceive subtle resonances and formal nuance: these are monotasking practices of closure, commitment, and contemplation. Their loss is one of the ways our contemporaries are becoming figurative widows and orphans (see James 1:27 [...keep oneself from being polluted by the world]).

Sounds like he’s closely observed my kids’ respective schools (high school and college)… and their text messaging histories.