The average attention span is shortening. Fragmenting, is the word often used. We have too many options granted to us by S&T. There’s the equivalent of the ‘be all and end all’ — the iPhone: the Centre for Fragmentation. When we are done whatsapping, facebooking and emailing, of course, we’ve got that somewhat geriatric device — the TV.

Who’d have thought it would age so swiftly? Speaking of ageing, who can remember the Walkman? The floppy disk? They weren’t that long ago but the pair might as well have existed in a medieval time, so much electrifying water has flowed under the bridge of invention since then. It used to be indecorous, politically inappropriate, to ask someone if they had a floppy to lend. Thankfully, that era has slipped by.

Gone too are audio cassettes. How many can recall the tape unspooling in the middle of a song and getting entangled in the spindle? We had enough time on our hands back then to do our best to untangle the mess, rewind it into the cassette with the help of a pencil or pen inserted into one of the tape case’s sprockets. And we were bold enough to risk hitting the ‘Play’ button once again, and run into another disentanglement, although we knew the song would never ever sound the same.

Today, one single day’s activity is diced up and fed into a thousand pigeonholes. It emerges like meat from a mincer, slender tendrils of thought all this-way-and-that, and higgledy-piggledy.

“Have you got time to watch a movie?” is countered by “How long is the film?” while “Have you read War and Peace?” is checkmated by “No, I’ll get the DVD and watch it.”

Catering to everyone’s tastes

The average household in Australia apparently has four televisions. Everybody’s individual taste is catered for. Mum and dad (after a mild disagreement only as to which channel they prefer, seven, nine or ten) can watch the day’s horror story, euphemistically known as The Evening News; their eldest, Kyle, prefers a DVD he is binge watching, Breaking Bad; his sister, Kylie, who fancies her chances as a singer is waiting to tune in to the reality show, The Voice; grandpa James, in the back room, is watching re-runs of Mash. They are all together under one roof, yet all momentarily-happy apart in their own rooms. Could they ever come together again? They try, but it’s a big ask.

Does anybody read at all these days? For sure. Stanley C. has 51 books all of which go with him to work and back. On his Kindle reader. The weight of knowledge has at last been miniaturised and lightened. If Stanley C. so wished he could transport the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in his top pocket, a feat that would have called into question one’s sanity had it been mentioned a mere 30 years ago. Stanley C. is an avid reader. Only, with the sheer abundance of reading material at the press of a button, he is, like a true gourmand, reading five novels simultaneously: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (up to page 557 of 1,496); Peter Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (Pg 223 of 7,925); Le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor (Pg1,073 of 5,101); Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Pg 2,505 of 10,575); and Allen Ginsberg’s Reality Sandwiches (Pg 443 of 727).

“So many books so little time,” he complains, in spite of his youthful age, a mere 34. Abundance and availability. They are doing something to our lives. And then, on a holiday in India, I meet Tashi, in a little house in a quiet green valley where time has stood resolutely still. We sit sipping weak Tibetan tea, eating a plate of momos and watching the two cows flick their tails lazily. Ahead, the blue day stretches endlessly.

The single biggest tragedy, I think, would be if Science &Technology were ever to set foot here. This, in the end, is innocence, as we used to know it.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.