We're All Schizophrenics Now?

Dalton Conley

In a recent post on his blog in the Opinion pages of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks discusses "the way modern technology and culture is changing our souls" and suggests that "over the past few decades people have become more fragmented, more fleeting, more distracted. They possess less interior depth."

Along the way he quotes Dalton Conley (see image at left), author of Elsewhere, USA (2008), who claims, according to Brooks, that "the modern person is not an individual . . . , but an 'intravidual.'" Or as Conley puts it, the modern person is a person with “multiple selves competing for attention with his/her own mind, just as externally she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously.”

So do you feel "bombarded"?  Or do you like having multiple selves to choose from?

Check out Brooks's post here.