How the Internet Enslaves Us

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Podcast Version: https://brianholdsworth.libsyn.com/

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

00:00 - Intro
00:38 - Mental Decline in Society
01:31 - The Role of Technology
03:53 - Age of False Information
04:46 - Loss of Critical Thinking
07:58 - Overwhelmed by the Internet

In one of my earliest videos I talk about the decline of Christianity and several people replied by claiming that the internet has dispelled common ignorance and so they're less susceptible to religious superstition.

But, if you really surveyed the general population since the popularization of the internet, could you really claim that the average person is more accurately informed, more knowledgeable, and more capable of communicating the truth? If you were to test most people’s grasp of general knowledge, my impression is that you would get an indication of decline in mental cognition and our ability to retain knowledge and information.

For example, in Canada, where I live, adult literacy has fallen dramatically over the past decade. Similarly, math scores have declined at alarming rates in the 21st century almost in direct correlation with the proliferation of mobile phones and the incessant solicitation of our connected technology to give it our full attention.

And I don’t think this should come as a big surprise to us. The less you exercise certain faculties, the weaker they will become and more and more, we’ve come to rely on computers to do our thinking for us. And when they aren’t productively thinking, they’re distracting our minds and filling them with junk food.

Today, instead of actually creating an inventory of knowledge and facts, we simply Google something and then forget it as quickly as we learned it, because we’ve already become distracted by the next thing we searched, or some notification, or something in our news feed.

Видео How the Internet Enslaves Us канала Brian Holdsworth