Short attention span screen generation poised to enter work place?

According to an article from World Business, “Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Oxford, argues that the culture of the screen, where everything is visual and available at once, is shaping a different kind of reasoning. "The screen culture is not conducive to taking time to think," she says. "The result is iconic thinking, quick fixes and short attention spans." Whether culture is the word to describe the possibly disturbing trend of some of the youth of Britain engaged in hours of nocturnal X-Box gaming, is open to debate. And if this is truly shaping a different type of brain as is also suggested is similarly a matter of conjecture, but what I found truly worrying was the suggestion that a generation bent on quick fixes and short attention spans are not only entering the work place but could next become managers. Arguably less qualified than their parents - despite degrees from some minor English town or village that now enjoys university status - and steeped in texting in a language reminiscent of the long redundant telex machine, how will we engage them in a conventional business approach? A different report noted how the impending retirement of the post war baby boomer generation was going to create a significant knowledge gap for many organizations. Will the newly named screen generation be their replacements? If so it is likely they will require knowledge in easily digestible packages. Whichever outcome, documenting, databasing searchable information seems to be something businesses should prioritise to ensure knowledge is retained in an organization, available to all that need it and accessible. Yet another report criticized the difficulty of pulling all the information together and finding it in a timely way. It is something long advocated by Technical Marketing Ltd, the building of a knowledge resource using web database techniques to acquire, store and provide accessibility to vital information. Enlightened companies are working on this recognizing the importance of securing the investment that has been made in acquiring the knowledge in the first place.