The other day I was listening to ABC Radio and a talk-back caller told us about his daughter. She is, according to her biased Dad, an intelligent young woman and wanted to think seriously about who she was voting for. Like any young digital native, she went online and looked at the policies of the major parties. According to her Dad, what she found is that one party (the LNP) had a set of constructive policies which outlined what it would do in government while the other (the Labor Party) just seemed intent on criticising their opponents. Now it's possible this man was an LNP plant (all the parties do this at elections) but it's also possible he was genuine. If so, our young digital native has let herself down badly. Perhaps the message is that what our young adults gain in comfort with the online world, they lose by having short attention spans. Nothing to do with the rise of social media, and everything to do with being 18. All that grey ...
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson