How Quick Culture Limits Friendship

“Quick Culture” can lead to no friends. Basically, “Quick Culture” means doing day to day activities and jobs at a fast pace and juggling too many things at a time to accomplish more. A good example of this phenomenon is multitasking. When someone gets too much into “Quick Culture,” a person starts spending too much time on rapidly shifting attention from one task to another task. This results in less focus on friendships and leads to weak friendship bonds. The topic of friendship is discussed in Konnikova’s article “The Limits of Friendships,” which also discusses about making stronger friendship bonds, comparing face to face friendships with virtual friendships and having a maximum number of the friends in a group. On the other hand, the topic of “Quick Culture” is discussed in Restak’s article “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of the era.” In addition to Quick Culture, the article discusses about the brain’s plasticity over the course of history due to technology advances and humans’ attention and focus divisions. Strong friendship bonds are made through shared experiences and investment of time. However, due to “Quick Culture” people tend to spend less time on a particular task, which causes attention division. So, friendship isn’t important in “Quick Culture” because friendships will never become deep; multitasking devalues the quality of friendship, and no type of physical connections are made to make the bond stronger in “Quick Culture.”

Friendship is developed and made stronger by spending more time together, but multitasking leaves less time to invest in friendships, so there is a time compression. Time compression means less time to do more work. Having a good friendship implies that there is a strong bond between one another. In addition to time compression, there is absence of “time to listen” which means a person does not have or take time to listen. Konnikova argues, “But one of the things that keeps face-to-face friendships strong is the nature of shared experience”. It can clearly be indicated that a strong bond can only be created by spending time together and sharing experiences. This can only be done by the investment of time. Conversely, in modern times, our brain is forced to manage too many things at a time. This causes the absence of “time to listen.” Restak stated, while giving an example of her patient, “no one would give her more than few minutes to tell her story”.

This demonstrates that people do not have time for one another (time to listen to their struggles or hear stories) in “Quick Culture.” This clearly contradicts the Konnikova’s arguments on friendship about investing time and focusing on building deeper friendship connections. So, there is very limited investment of time in building deep connections and strong bonding. In fact, no one has to time even sit and listen. This reduces the formation of strong friendship bonds. If this is the case with one person talking to other, then the idea of forming multiple friendship bonds can never be achieved due to more time compression and absence of “time to listen.” To conclude, friendships in “Quick Culture” never get deeper and stronger due to less investment of time in friendship. If there is no deep and strong friendship, then the friendship is not important.

The number of people one can communicate with is limited, and multitasking at the same time leads to a devaluation of the quality of the relationship. Friendship needs a lot of communication and a good social bonding. Since the number of people one can talk to is limited, the less number of people one talks to stronger and better will be their bonding and friendship. Konnikova states, “If you garner connections with more people you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital more thinly. So the average capital is lower”. Clearly Konnikova is emphasizing the point that talking more and investing time in fewer amounts of people is beneficial in terms of building a good friendship. In “Quick Culture”, one’s brain is focusing on too many things. However, the brain can focus on one activity at a time. So, the focus on too many things leads to distraction and division of the attention. Restak claims, favoring Konnikova’s idea, “As a result of technological advances we participate in many different and disparate “realities” yet as a result of our attention and focus problems we can’t fully participate in them”. It clearly postulates that multitasking leads to distraction. Both ideas are connected to each other as Konnikova claimed that the number of people someone can talk to is limited, and Restak claimed that multitasking leads to distraction and loss of attention. Moreover, he argues, multitasking depletes the quality of the relationship. Even if someone talks to a certain amount of people, still the person would be distracted due to the habit of multitasking. As a result, one will not even be able to focus on talking topic while actually talking. Rather, attention would in some past moment or worrying about the future meeting. This results in devaluation of a quality of friendship. Thus, no strong friendship is made due to “Quick Culture”. The number of people one can communicate is limited. In “Quick Culture”, even if someone is talking to a certain amount of people, due to multitasking the attention is diverted. This leads to poor communication. Therefore, no good friends are made due to multitasking.

Strong friendship bonds are formed because of some sort of physical connection, such as touch, but “Quick Culture” does not give enough time while talking to cause any type of touch in any way due to time shortage caused by multitasking. This indicates a poor friendship. Physical connections mean a physical touch of any form. Konnikova claims, “The words are easy. But the way someone touches you, even casually, tells you more about what they’re thinking of you”. It is clearly marked that Konnikova strongly emphasizes the point that touch is very important in developing a friendship. On the other hand, Restak claims, “Attention span of adults is extremely exaggerated”. This means that the amount of time an adult spends on doing something with focus. This time is known as attention span. It can be interpreted that from Restak’s claim that the attention span is depleting in adults. Konnikova argues, touch – of any kind – is required for good social bonding. Restak states that attention spans of humans are depleting. Due to less attention span and multitasking, when a person will get involved in a chat that person will spend less time talking that too with less attention span which will lead to no involvement of touches. The situation gets worse when someone is talking to more than one person while the distraction is still there. In that case, the focus which was already divided is now divided even more. Therefore, social bonding and friendship will not be stronger. In the final analysis, good friendship cannot develop due to lack of physical connectivity between people, which is caused by depleting attention span and multitasking.

In Quick Culture, no deep connections are made in a friendship, multitasking leads to poor quality of relationship, and there are no type of physical connections made to strengthen the bond of friendship, which makes friendship least important in “Quick Culture”. In Quick Culture, friendships can never get deep and strong because of less time invested in it. Similarly, multitasking leads to loss of focus, and amount of people one can communicate is limited; so, talking with others in “Quick Culture” leads to attention division, which leads to poor communication skills, and no good friends are made. A physical connection is vital in a friendship, but multitasking and attention division make conversations so fast that one does not get time to get connected physically. Ultimately, friendship is not important in “Quick Culture” unless one finds a way to invest time and develop a good bonding.