in case you were sleeping this decade

As the first decade of the 21st Century comes to a close, Newsweek put out a video that recaps the past ten years in 7 minutes. If you somehow missed the last 10 years, it's not too late to catch up and it takes very little time. I must admit I'm not so sure how I felt about this video other than I thought it was worth sharing.

A lot happened this past decade - an election decided by the Supreme Court, the invention of the ipod, 9/11, Two on going Wars, The Great Recession, Facebook, gay marriage, a black president, a female Speaker of the House, The Sopranos, hurricane Katrina, Youtube, GM bankruptcy, the decline of American global domination, etc. The list is endless.

Is it a good thing that we can somehow encapsulate an entire decade within 7 minutes? Should such a transformative time become just another piece of content on Youtube? Does it somehow trivialize our history?

To Newsweek's credit they did say at the end of the video that they may have missed some stuff. Despite being part of traditional media, it's good to know they haven't lost their grasp of the obvious. They did ask their viewers to point out any omissions, lets say like the rise of China, by Twittering or Facebooking them. Nice use of social media by the old guard. However, is it a pause for concern about the future of our culture?

In technology there is a thing called Moore's law. It's a concept that a microchip gets smaller every 18 to 24 months resulting in an increase in our computing power. This improvement brings us smart phones, broadband and various other advancements on a continual basis.

I'm starting to worry there is a Moore's laws as it relates to attention span. As technology periodically makes our world move quicker, the shorter our collective attention spans seem to become. We can't possibly consume all the data that is available to us. Maybe it's easier to have it condensed into a series of Youtube videos. Is there so much information to keep us knowledgeable but too little depth to make us wise?

I don't know the answers to any of this stuff. It just makes me wonder if the next generation will stop to analyze our past or simply treat it as another piece of disposable data.