Here we go again. A report by something called the the National Organisation of University Art Schools says that schools should be teaching ‘visuacy’. The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) is similarly focussing on the “outcome” of visuacy being a stand-alone subject for years K-10 and the National Review of Visual Education says visuacy should be given the same prominence as literacy and numeracy.

So what is this strange new skill that will be so fundamental to students in the 21st Century? Judging by the fact that the report cites the example of deconstructing an advertisement for Elle Macpherson’s kickers to establish “conditions of value and meaning” alongside an examination of Picasso’s Guernica, visuacy appears to mean visual literacy plus post-modernism minus a sense of humour.

Am I taking the #*&!? Absolutely. It would be silly not to. Doubtless members of the Visual Education Roundtable (“a coalition of key stakeholders to be an advisory body to CMC and MCEETYA”) will paint me as a pedantic philistine but I can live with that. Newspeak like this is a mutant life form from outer space and needs to be killed off before it infects the whole planet.

To put the record straight I’m all in favour of visual literacy. So is my mum, who used to be an art teacher. Our brave new world is saturated with images and it’s going to get much worse in the future. Everything from walls and tabletops to cereal packets and clothing will soon have the potential to become screens displaying the almost infinite amount of information and entertainment created by you, me and everyone else.

Thus we will be drowning in digital dross and there will be a real need to filter this material, either by visualising information or by understanding the difference between semi-stylish eye candy and items of real substance.

But according to post-modernist academics with a love of Jerry built jargon all of this imagery is of equal value. A video by Kylie is as meaningful as a painting Van Gogh. We should be so lucky. My point here is not a discussion about postmodernism. What’s getting my goat is simply the use of bad language, especially in schools. Yes we live in a visually cluttered culture but that doesn’t mean that words don’t matter.

Things are getting really weird. I have a female friend that goes to bed with an electronic device every night. Her husband is getting fed up and claims it’s ruining their sex life. Her response is that she’s in meetings all day and needs to take a laptop to bed to catch-up with her emails. This is a bit extreme but I know of lots of other people that hardly ever switch off.

You can see this first hand when passengers switch their mobile phones back on the minute their plane lands. What’s quite so important that it can’t wait ten minutes until they are inside the terminal building I have no idea. Perhaps it’s yet another example of how people feel insecure if they are not always available or constantly connected.

Something is going on here. Soon after the millennium (probably the Tuesday around 7.08am) we collectively decided to redefine the concept of freedom to include notions of speed and wireless connectivity. It’s certainly a seductive idea.

We are now free to work anywhere we want. We can do it on aeroplanes at 39,000 feet, in the back of the car, in bed or on the kitchen table. Should children be exposed to their parents doing this? Most people will say, “what’s the harm?” but I am worried about the signals these devices are sending out. Surely what people are saying is that I am more interested in being alone with my digital network than being with you?

The desire to be connected isn’t limited to work either. Twitter, as some people will know, is a micro-blogging service that allows people to answer the question “What are you doing?” by sending regular up-to-the-minute newsflashes of their daily existence to chosen friends. Messages are limited to 140 characters and, judging by most of the messages I’ve seen, most users are limited to an IQ of 110. (Actually that’s not true. Twitter seems to be the domain of uber-geeks with very high IQs but I couldn’t resist saying that).

It’s a sort of stream of consciousness thing that results in babblings about being “thirsty” or “going to lunch”. In theory Twitter is a fun way to keep in touch but I am starting to wonder whether it’s possible to be too in touch.

For example, I have a friend that’s a ‘Twit’. If I wanted to I could sign up and find out that he was “eating vegemite toast” at 7.08pm” or that “I’m in bed now” at 12.04am. But I don’t need to know this.

Back in the old days people kept certain types of information to themselves. I think it was called either privacy or security. Nowadays such digital exhibitionism is practically compulsory. Even the next President of the United States is on Twitter (“Just saw Hillary, she has a gun”?).

Here’s fun game. Visit an ATM and play “Guess your PIN.” If you win you get some money. If you don’t you loose your card, usually after the third attempt.Other versions of the game are available for credit cards and removable car radios.

In a survey, 63% of Australian’s said that they had difficulty remembering things like PIN numbers. Personally, I can’t even remember my own home phone number these days. I’m also starting to struggle with passwords to social networks that I’ve joined during moments of midnight madness. I even ‘lost’ my new bicycle for a few days last month because I couldn’t remember the padlock code and couldn’t remember where I’d written it down either. Still, it was better than last year. I padlocked my bike somewhere but, to this day, I can’t remember where.

This might be my age but I doubt it. My lack of memory is caused by too much data. Digitalisation has made it too easy to create and distribute information, with the result that I’m drowning in a sea of endless trivia.

But there’s a much bigger problem on the horizon. The Internet might be making us stupid. For example, have you noticed how attention spans are shortening? Perhaps you are scanning newspaper articles because they appear too long? Or perhaps you’ve read bits of books twice because you weren’t properly concentrating.

The problem is that infinite choice is fragmenting our attention. Digitalisation is also fuelling an obsession with speed with the result that Information and entertainment are now only acceptable if they are delivered in snack-sized formats. Similarly, speed of information retrieval is becoming more important in some instances than accuracy.

Google is also making us somewhat stupid because the first thing we do when we need information is do what everyone does. We go to Google and we look at the first few pages of results. This is a problem because if information isn’t ranked on the first couple of pages it might as well not exist. It’s also a problem because everyone is looking for things in the same place and everyone is using the same sources to create ‘new’ information. Hence, we are becoming increasingly self-referential and our knowledge is narrowing. Don’t believe me? Well the first thing I did when I started writing this was to Google ‘Google Goggles’. Guess what I found? Something I’d already written but forgotten about. Brilliant.