TLDR

[Michi713]

 

The book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr is about how the internet has gotten people accustomed to receiving only snippets of information about any given subject in stylized, neat little packages, just grazing the surfaces of subjects, not requiring any thought. 

 

Examples are what passes for articles these days, twits, posts, memes and videos.  What passes for research (and this is by so called professional journalists) is a pathetic joke. 
 

This created the short attention spans that have kept the public from 1. never demonstrating any in depth knowledge of anything at all, and 2. assuming what little they know about any given subject is sufficient to form an understanding and even base an opinion on it. 

 

Terrible outcomes of this are:
    1.    people are walking around with stupid and superficial knowledge 
    2.    they are quick to jump to conclusions about something they know absolutely nothing about
    3.    they actually believe that they know all there is to know about any given thing and there is no need for further inquiry.   
    4.    It leaves more than ample room for misinformation and misinterpretation of just everything under the sun
    5.    A compulsion based on concern of missing out on the very latest developments 
    6.    Turns everyone into a journalist in their own mind, spreading even more shallow snippets of utterly butchered information

 

I am fully guilty of this too! 

 

It creates a mind prison.  What’s driving this is the idea that knowledge has to be delivered fast.  Faster than a pizza. 

 

By following news feeds that churn out new shallow “content” minute by minute it is impossible to determine which topic is worth considering, let alone formulate a clear, thoughtful analysis before being swept away to the next topic.  So we go round and round on the merry go round as the clutter accumulates in our brains. 

 

All it creates is a false understanding of the world and tragically, each other.  Surface judgements are made on individuals and whole groups of people based on nothing of substance at all.  
 

And in the process of condensing our own thoughts for mass consumption, some of us even lose touch with ourselves.  How dehumanizing and how much beauty and awe of life is lost this way. 
 

To counter this destructive force is to accept that everything and everyone is complicated, intricate, and infinitely mysterious.  That one can read twenty books on any given subject and perform experiments and still not fully understand it.  But one may develop an original thought here and there.   
 

 

[zarkov]

Fully agree and guilty of the same too.