GET OFF the Internet! It's rotting your brain!

STOP READING THIS THREAD!

Hurry, quick, get off the Internet before it eats your brain and leaves you a drooling zombie, incapable of understand sophisticated arguments.

The Coming Distraction

(What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains?)

Lately there’s been some discussion of a new book by Nicolas Carr, which offers a rather harsh indictment of our Internet culture. As I read about this book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” I recalled a quote from the introduction to a collection of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales I purchased several years ago. “It is a strange irony that our all-embracing forms of communication have killed the storyteller, and may end by making us all mute.”

Carr’s thesis is that the way we receive and access information changes the way our brains work. The scattered and disconnected landscape of the Internet and its progeny (e.g. email, social networking sites, etc…) has reduced our ability to focus our intellect and to understand sophisticated arguments. As a result our ability to think in a profound and contemplative manner is atrophying.

We used to leisurely read the paper or digest a lengthy magazine article to obtain information. I’ve been digging through old, Catholic periodicals and those articles can be long and weighty, but well worth reading nonetheless. Now our information comes in sound bites and email alerts. In my day job the PowerPoint is the supreme form of communication as everyone wants just enough information to understand the main points. Fair enough. At times high-level summaries are necessary and worthwhile, but now they threaten to crowd out all other forms of communication.

The problem is not that there are new and useful ways of distilling a lot of information, but rather that we are losing something important. We’re losing the ability to process and understand any information that’s not presented summarily. Jerry Mander wrote a book back in the 1970s decrying television as a medium of communication. One of his primary arguments was that television would ultimately reduce political and social discourse to flimsy slogans with no real intellectual content. Leisure had devolved from the basis of culture, to the root of intellectual degeneration.

Not only are more traditional press outlets being replaced by transitory media, we are losing our ability to comprehend those few remaining beacons of truth in shifting sands of confusion. New forms of communication are eroding the appetite of the young for the timeless tales that nourished generations. Tom Stoppard, best known for his wry Shakespeare adaptation Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, spoke recently of his fear that technology is sweeping away the printed page. Children don’t read anymore, as Stoppard noted, they live in a world of technology where the moving image takes precedence over the printed page. When an installment of the post-modern literary establishment bemoans the growing disorders of modern life we had better take note.

Read more: The Remnant

What, you're still here?


Well, you can't say I didn't warn you.

[edit on 7/28/10 by FortAnthem]

Originally posted by FortAnthem

What, you're still here?

Well, you can't say I didn't warn you.

If I get off the internet, how will I know what the weather will be like
or who won the big game?

reply to post by FortAnthem

GET OFF the Internet! It's rotting your brain!

....said the article on the internet, that depends on traffic and readership--on the internet.

Thats REALLY SMART! GET OFF THE BEST SOURCE OF EVERYTHING PLANETARY IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THIS PLANET!!

reply to post by Chamberf=6


HAHAHA! Exactly!!!

Lemme pose this to you.

Are they just hypocrits or are they agenda driven government lackys trying to convince all of the people that are aware or becoming so to stop?

Either way, fair read and fair assumptions but loses all merit in that it berates the very medium it is using for distribution.

too long;did not read

Wait, wat?

Nick Carr did an interview with George Knapp this past Sunday on Coast to Coast AM, I think the guy is all wet and just trying to sell a book..

Recap from the interview

TextDuring the first half of the program, George Knapp welcomed writer Nick Carr, who thinks the Internet is forcing us to lose our contemplative brains for a distracted sampling of scanned bits of information. In the latter half of the show, author and speaker Lee Crockett looked at the beneficial aspects of the rapid advancement of technology.

Explaining his concerns over the Internet's role in changing the way people think, Carr said that knowledge can be broken down into two parts: finding information and being able to think deeply about that information. It is that second aspect of knowledge which he believes the Internet is causing people to lose. Contrasting the Internet with books, he pointed out that printed text trains people to become immersed in the material and teaches them to pay attention. However, Carr said, the Internet performs the opposite function. "It doesn't shield us from distraction, the way a printed page does, it inundates us with distractions," he lamented.

www.coasttocoastam.com...

[edit on 28-7-2010 by Aquarius1]

well you see the problem is ,... I cant,.. this is it for me,.. it is all I have,....You,. all of you,...it is all I think about,... ATS this ATS that,..
It is in my mainframe,... cant... stop.

But really I can see this point,.. My brain seems to stop when I sit here,.. I have all this yard work to do,. I have a garage to clean
Hell I even need to do my laundry,.. but ,. here I am ...O M G

This actually brings up a great point.

I think I can speak for a good amount of people on here when I say that we are addicted to information, or rather just wanting to know the truth. We are constantly searching and looking at new information. Some of it makes us react emotionally, a lot of it negatively, if you really look at the big picture. Basically, it can just be another form of stress that we are afflicting ourselves with. If you have any mental or even some physical health concerns, processing such information constantly with many different emotional responses can be making things worse for you. But that's only if you care.

I am currently waiting for a global EMP.

[edit on 28-7-2010 by SinkingSun]

In my 20's I could write cogent prose and do unusual things like remember information but now that has all but atrophied now all I see are large-scale structures in the fabric of space and time-- all bones, no meat; all structure, no shape. It's too late for me.

Depending on the information you consume from the internet, you are actually increasing your nous rate of evolution.

It's like saying, get out of the library, it's bad because they have crappy magazines on one shelf.

You can be on the internet and still control your brain.

I, for one, can't wait until my surrogate is delivered so I never have to leave the house.

Everything in moderation, right?

[edit on 7/28/2010 by ~Lucidity]

reply to post by FortAnthem


Someone who lives with monkeys will begin to pick up the characteristics of monkey's. Someone who is raised by wolves will learn to hunt and survive in a pack.

So I guess that is why I have turned into an idiot



edit: spelling.

[edit on 28-7-2010 by NeutronAvenger]

Originally posted by SinkingSun
I am currently waiting for a global EMP.

Dude, that would send us ALL back into the stone age. An EMP over North America would create such massive food shortages, electrical outages, transportation shutdowns, etc.

Basically a complete break down of society. You would NOT want to be a rich person in Beverly Hills when the masses descend upon their neighborhoods. It would be like Rawanda but on a much more massive scale.

Jeez, now I feel like I've gotta go through my WTSHTF checklist one more time...

Originally posted by harrytuttle

Originally posted by SinkingSun
I am currently waiting for a global EMP.

Dude, that would send us ALL back into the stone age. An EMP over North America would create such massive food shortages, electrical outages, transportation shutdowns, etc.

Basically a complete break down of society. You would NOT want to be a rich person in Beverly Hills when the masses descend upon their neighborhoods. It would be like Rawanda but on a much more massive scale.

Jeez, now I feel like I've gotta go through my WTSHTF checklist one more time...

I am kinda with Sinking sun,. but I wish for a city sized meteor,...
Although An EMP would be cool to,... I am soo tired of my cell phone
the electronic age has created me an equivalent of a crack addict ,. but with electronics

[edit on 28-7-2010 by Lil Drummerboy]

Due to my father being a techie, I grew up with the internet. We're childhood best buddies! And there's millions of young adults like myself out there who are the same. To put it modestly, this theory at least doesn't apply to me. On the contrary, I've seen several studies that deal with cognitive performance and video games, which almost always show a positive correlation. Some video games actually enhance our cognitive performance. This isn't the same as computer usage but is relevant.

Even if it were true that computer usage is interfering with complex thinking abilities, there would be no way to prove it. The mechanism he presents as responsible for the decrease in mental function is highly questionable. On top of that, there are millions of environmental or genetic or cultural elements that could be causing the same hypothesized effect.

It's a poor theory that rests on very little, and can never be proven. It's absolutely worthless.

reply to post by EnlightenUp


LoL exactly. The author could be entirely right, and it could just be psychological (true psychology, not pill salesmen) evolution at the end of the day.

In other words, no need to be alarmed even if It's true. It probably has elements of truth, but yeah... no need to explain, we can connect the dots thanks to all the connections we make. Though we might not be able to write 500 page books on a subject that requires 30, and we can't wrtie laws that take up 1000 pages, when all you really need is 20. Etc.

[edit on 28-7-2010 by Novise]

reply to post by Novise


If a critical component of intelligence is instinctually knowing what to discard as irrelevant, we may need to evolve amply-sized rectums, which may explain the growing incidences of irritable-bowel-syndrome, Chron's disease and other digestive maladies of those that were unfortunate enough to have mutated just short of the needed irreducable complexity.

Psychological evolution indeed.

[edit on 7/28/2010 by EnlightenUp]

yeah i heard his lecture at UC Berkeley yesterday-

basically he says that the internet is rewiring our brains for superficial multitasking, and the people who are able to focus on one thing at a time (which the internet is absolutely NOT) are more efficient at multitasking then these people being trained by the internet.......

he said the internet is as big if not bigger than the way books changed human consciousness......sitting down and being absorbed into a book is completely contrary to our survival instincts......we miss a possible food or water source..........a sexual "opportunity"..............but that the internet is the most efficient way of physically changing the brain to be, well, stupid, actually. he said if you were to design the most perfect tool for changing humn consciousness it would look exactly like the internet.....

my own observations: information is not knowledge and is most definitely not wisdom. by giving information its power of reality we become materialists and not the spiritual beings we were born to be.

reply to post by FortAnthem


According to a recent humorous opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, people clicking on links so much made it hard for them to concentrate on reading.

I noticed that I developed some type of hyper-concentration while online, which means that offline, I was only able to observe the exact moment in time, and would start thinking that I was missing the next big opportunity every few seconds even while doing something productive!