is with the shortening human attention span, it is only going to get worse because the already short attention span is growing shorter.
Oddly, though, while I rail on about the ever-presence of smartphones, imagine how much quicker this riot would have faded if not for their presence and even more amusing, of their presence in the hands of the rioters.
One more creepy thing - a couple of years ago I saw a news segment, it may have been on 60 Minutes, that showed how easy it was to hack smartphones in public places and how easy it was not only to gain information from one smartphone but to all the smartphones linked to that smartphone. On top of this, I imagine the Feds have a huge wealth of information gleaned from these smartphones from cellphone towers and other means not well known of by the general public.
Here is one more thing to ponder - many years ago in 1970 novelist Lawrence Sanders wrote a book called The Anderson Tapes that was later made into a movie starring Sean Connery. From what I can recall, the book/movie was about some sort of heist and was with a concurrent theme that technology captured the planning and carrying out of the crime but because the information was not pulled together, the heist went on.
Today, governments have the capabilities to collect this information unlike ever before (and I suspect many, many crimes go "undetected" because governments do not what this capability to be fully known - think of it - say there is a murder along some out of the way place and cell phone towers are able to pull in all the phone data of the cellular phones that were in that area and with that data those phones can be tracked and more information collected. Say even, with that information technology allows the data inside of those telephones is able to burrow into. Now, imagine if the general public knew of this capability. My point is, if the general public actually knew of and understood the full data collection abilities of private companies and governments, it would probably shit its pants).
