The impact of screen culture on the human brain merits the same public debate and funding for research as climate change, says one of the world’s most eminent neuroscientists.
As the online world continues to expand, Oxford University’s Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield has warned excessive screen culture may be changing the way our brains are wired….
One Eyed Rhyno’s new music video, The Bird, reacting to the Gulf oil spill
I just finished reading this book last night and it is a great read! Taking examples from philosophers from the past like Plato, Socrates, and Thoreau the author shows how they dealt with the new technologies of their time and the busyness it created. I was looking for some insight on how to better manage the screens in my life since I am surrounded by them in my work and pulled by their never ending tug in my personal life as well. The main idea is that for the most part we can control how and when we choose to use technology in our lives and he gives great insight on the philosophies of disconnecting and going inward when we desire.
I have been feeling the urge to become vegetarian again and came upon this book tonight at the bookstore which is next on my reading list
I love this short essay
"The more connected we are, the more we depend on the world outside ourselves to tell us how to think and live."
— William Powers from his book, Hamlet’s BlackBerry
The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble…
arrive home from work, drained and empty. Too tired for human interaction, I press the buttons on the remote and stare blankly into the big TV box. It’s not long before the commercials and endless parade of product placements overwhelm my defenses and penetrate my mind. Every detail of every message is meticulously calculated, designed to be repetitive and hypnotic, played over and over until the mindfuck finally kicks. In. My head is now filled with fatuous desire. Fast forward. Like a junkie on a comedown, I stumble into the sterile mall corridors as if in some kind of trance. The motley group of shoppers surrounding me, all the same – glazed eyes, blank stares, faces twisted into ugly masks of want. We are an army of zombies…
Multitasking on smartphones, iPads, and the Mobile Web makes some feel smarter and others just more scattered. Is it changing how we think?
I read this article in print yesterday and ended up ordering 2 books on Amazon (pretty cheap) to learn more about some of the aspects of the article content. One is called “Slow Reading” and the other is “Hamlet’s BlackBerry”. I found the article to be very interesting and highly recommend it. As far as myself and the question above, I’m not sure that the Internet makes me smarter: I certainly feel that I have access to any information I may need, and I feel skilled in knowing how to find information although I am not sure how much depth I retain for the long term in anything I read online. At the same time, I actually perceive information I view electronically on a short-term basis, meaning information I want to delve into deeper I find I want to read in print as it is a more enriching experience that seems to stay with me longer.
I definitely feel that multi-tasking with the gadgets of our day and the Internet make me feel more scattered and cause stress. It is harder to settle into a book or to just look at one thing at a time online as I tend to click all over the place as my mind jumps from idea to idea. When we spend so much of our time online it becomes very hard to stop those patterns when we break free into the analog world - it takes awhile to slow back down to the speed of the natural world when we finally do unplug.
It will be interesting to see how all of this will affect us as a civilization in the future. I do fear that way too many people, kids especially, are spending the majority of their lives online and that there are definite issues resulting from not spending enough time outside and away from all the mental noise. There is a disconnect when we read online about bad things that are happening in our natural world and we don’t have the experiences in the natural world to care in the deep ways that we should be caring. That just may be our downfall.
