From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-acosta-lisw-cht/stop-shopping-and-start-t_b_788568.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=121410&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry&utm_term=Daily+Brief
December 14, 2010 09:04 AM
A while back a friend told me about a graffiti artist in New York City who’d been covering subway and building walls with a simple declarative statement: Stop shopping and start thinking! This is particularly interesting since we are now approaching the season to shop and shop and shop and shop. It also made me wonder what he was suggesting we actually think about. And perhaps more importantly, what we were doing instead of thinking.
So, more than half-way across the country, I went into town and I spent a day watching people. I observed them on the street, in stores, in restaurants, on television, at gas stations. A typical group of young people (anywhere from approximately 10 years of age to 20) walked in much the same way a school of herring swim, in a huddle, somehow sensing one another’s movements, veering left, then right without much in the way of verbal communication because every one of them was either wearing an iPod or had a cell phone planted on one ear.
What I noticed overall, regardless of age group, was that the more crowded the environment and stimulating the situation, the less interpersonal the interaction between us. People distracted by brightly lit window displays or by robotic massage chairs or hundred-foot long displays of plasma television screens had very little to do with one another, even if they were “together.” Many walked about with glazed eyes and slightly open mouths, trance-like. I am not aware of any research to validate or refute this observation, but it is what I saw.
So, the graffiti artist who bade us to start thinking must have been seeing more or less what I saw — a world rapidly becoming disconnected and insensate from the onslaught of stimulation that is part and parcel of modern life.