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The European: How do you weigh the advantages of accumulating information against the distraction we talked about?Carr: There’s no question that the internet offers all sorts of benefits – that is the reason why we use it so much. It is an incredibly powerful and useful technology that makes all sorts of information immediately available to us. Things that used to be impossible, hard or expensive to find are now right there. And we all know how to improve our ability to make decisions with it. But accompanying that, incredibly, is the fact that we become so intent on gathering information that we never slow down and think deeply about the information we find. We gain the ability to harvest huge amounts of data but we lose the ability to engage in contemplation, reflexion and other modes of thinking that require a large amount of attentiveness and the ability to filter out distractions and disruptions. You can’t separate the good and the bad: We gain something important but we sacrifice something important as well....
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Nicholas Carr's book the Shallows is fascinating as well and would be worth scooping up for everyone's week long beach sesh next month. What is lost in the age of the instant information? Is the internet changing our mental processing, the way we think?
I believe it is.
In the third world, for the most part, everyone's problems are tangible. Lack of food, water, shelther or the everpopular "I have malaria and this fever suuuuuucks." But in industrialized nations and especially the United States, all of our basic needs are taken care of, above and beyond their original call of duty. Take food, for instance. Food isn't really about hunger anymore, its now about taste and in its more advanced stage, health. Cardboard flavoured NutraGrieve bars prove that much of the Taste category is lost when a product graduates to the Health stage but that's neither here nor there. Corn pudding and fried apples might not be the most healthiest thing in the world but it raises morale and since most health problems start on the inside first, there is something to be said for that too, right?
Isn't that why its called soul food?
Anyway, the point I'm jonesing for here in the library (a beautiful 70 degrees & flourescent) is that our most basic needs in life have now been given higher degrees of meaning beyond their original purpose. Since all our bodily concerns are taken care of, we graduated into a stage where all our problems and worries in the world are therefore internalized. And the speed of the internet connectivity ramps that up to a manic pace. America is one of the few nations in the world where people have to create tragedies in order to feel alive. It's not like our existence is threatened on a day to day basis. Maybe in South Florida though, where monster Burmese pythons, originally decaged by the wrath of Hurricane Andrew in 1993, slinked into the lush Everglades and eventually started making babies with another scaley escapee on the run. Now these snakes are a classified invasive species. The Supreme Court passed a motion to ban the importing of these creatures from overseas, beginning this year. You know why? Because these snakes are fearless. They've been honing their survival chops on alligators ever since they've learned to crawl and now, with a confidence as big as their appetite, they're creeping back out of the swamp with a vengence and having their way with the Miami-Dade area, wolfing down sleeping babies and plucking granddads off their golf carts. For fun.
Surely, I jest but seriously, National Geographic just did an article about how raccoon and opossum sightings, based on a ten year average, are down 99% (!!!) in some places. These snakes are eating on everything in sight, therefore doubling their all time records for caloric intake and inevitably prompting them to twice their average size in a few years....
Did you see how easy that was? Something was just created out of no nothing. That's exactly what happens when folks plug up online and into their social networks and begin extrapolating all kinds of dramatic conclusions from a limited amount of information. Thus bringing a heap of unnecessary stress into the world. I'm absolutely guilty of it but I'm also aware its all bullshit and isn't that right there the first step towards solving the problem? All I'm saying is, everyone needs to go scuba diving more often. It's meditative, active, it can be colourful, computers don't work and most importantly, human beings are no longer the apex predator. Contrary to popular belief, fear can be a great thing. It heightens the senses, increases overall awareness and stimulates the heart. Shazam. Who would have thought snakes and sharks would be such good teachers of humility? The dead, that's who. Think about that
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The Cramps-Primitive
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