Taking Control of Your Life Back in an Impossible World

Intelligence is sited as the ability to learn and to apply what is learned. It is not the accumulation of data. Learning occurs at multiple levels: physical, emotional, factual and intellectual. Each of these areas are driven by different factors and change as we mature. Intelligence is impacted by each of our learning processes. First as a child we learn through sensual experiences, and as our brains mature we are able to move into abstract thinking we learn through challenges in each level of our experience. We learn through social relationships, through every grade at school and the problems we are required to solve, poems we are required to memorize, essays we are required to research, and the books we are required to read. All of these processes call for the active engagement of us as participants engaging in our own creative thought modelled by the skills and knowledge that we have developed.
Google distracts us from this kind of creative thinking. Google dazzles and entertains us with its ability to provide people globally with an infinite supply of facts, resources, and facilitates through which we can gather further information. It simplifies our access to data. However, the foundation of Google’s financial model is grounded in advertising and for that reason it pesters us with constant interruptions making it extremely difficult to focus on any single article at hand.
The most disastrous upshot of our obsessive use of the internet and the crippling effects it is having on the sustainability of our attention span is that it has become a principle contributor in driving many of the young adults and teens of today towards developing an unhealthy dependence and utter infatuation with attention deficit disorder prescription drugs such as Adderall, and Ritalin. Dependency on such drugs can lead to: high blood pressure, sleep disorders, seizures, weight loss, hallucinations, severe dehydration, muscle pains, vomiting, mood changes and nervousness (much of which I have personally experienced as side effects of my own prescribed use of Adderall). This new prescription craze concerns me a great deal, having personally been prescribed such medications since my sophomore year of high school, I have experienced both the positive and negative aspects of such drugs. Though I cannot help but wonder what possible long term effects may transpire in the years to come for these young adults and teenagers who are continuing to use these concentration drugs during such fundamental years of their development? We are one mouse click away from losing ourselves sanity to a black hole of passwords, web addresses, emails, abbreviations, webcams, and downloads otherwise known as the internet. As such we have evolved into a society that is full of contradictions, obsessed with instant gratification, and that has tragically begun becoming increasingly unintelligent in recent years.
I fear that we have already begun to become what Richard Foreman so astutely referred to as “pancake people’ —spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button”. I see our society falling victim to this condition not only in how we are approaching the internet but in how we are approaching our relationships, schooling, careers, and our thoughts of ourselves. We have become a society which both demands and expects instant gratification. We have become obsessed with multi-tasking. We have become infatuated with obtaining quantity over quality. We want it all and we want it now. The internet is significantly responsible for promoting this way of life and in effect spoiling our society. The internet has made so many people accustomed to having nearly anything they could possibly need a mere mouse click away. Moreover, it has robbed us of our former patients and the ability to focus on a single task for an extended period of time. We now find ourselves frustrated and perturbed if we are required to search beyond the surface level to find the results we need. With everything coming so easily to the youths of today I fear that these students may not know how to approach and overcome a more challenging situations in their future when the answers are not already so plainly accessible and obvious to them. They do not know what it is to truly have to apply themselves to try and find new answers and creative solutions to problems. Students today seem to be less concerned with the learning process and work that occurs in the interim than with simply getting the assignment done.
Our generation is constantly looking for shortcuts. One such example can be seen in a study performed by Dr. Rafael Capurro which establishes a solid connection between the growing number of university students that have chosen to plagiarise other people’s materials instead of producing their own creative work and the rising number of college students that are accessing the web. This dwindling of ethics and the decline of ambition demonstrated by these younger generations will in time prove to be a serious problem once they enter the work place. The fact of the matter is that in reality the only way to get ahead is through hard work and determination. These are the qualities that deliver results and those are the qualities which contribute to giving a person substance. Google may be able to overload a student with enough random facts to pass a pop quiz, but it cannot instil within them the common sense they will need to survive later in life. I fear this will prove to be a rude awakening for these individuals which our society has weakened by feeding them with a silver spoon of technological connivances.



Nicholas Carr summarized Google’s current philosophy in his article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid" as being, “The more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers”. This concept upsets me because it exemplifies the way in which Google seems to be missing the point knowledge entirely. Knowledge is not about speed it is about understand. The exceptional written works produced by the most brilliant philosophers, historians, politicians, mathematicians, and astronomers of the past are not meant to be skimmed over. They are meant to teach us, and provoke our own curiosity. Each page functions as a piece of the puzzle and was thus included for a reason and is indispensable to understanding the overall whole.
The original founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page speak excitedly of the technological possibilities of the human race; a world in which people could be hooked in or dare I say replaced by computers. In 2004, Brin stated that, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” This notion is both disturbing and unnatural. I must also beg the question. To what benefit would it be to have access to an endless supply of information if it was just programmed into you? Moreover, what would be the process, if any, for filtering sites with insubstantial and invalid information. Who would be responsible for determining a site’s legitimacy. After all what purpose does it serve for you to have information planted in your brain when in reality true knowledge is gained not simply by being exposed to an article, and blindly accepting someone else’s opinion to be fact, but by questioning, critiquing, and having a personal reaction to that material. Only then can a person develop their own educated opinion on matter, and by doing so have learned just a little bit more about themselves.
Our society’s current addiction to the internet is having an unhealthy and unnatural effect on people’s day to day lives. We live in a the social order where kids spend much of their free time chatting over the net instead of interacting face to face, or playing video games instead of in their own backyards. Slothfulness is the last thing we need to be encouraging in a population that is already eating its way towards unprecedented dangerously high levels of national obesity. After all, exercise releases endorphins. Endorphins both enhance a person’s clarity of thought as well as provide them with a happier more positive outlook on life. Therefore it is crucial that we do not let the youth of today become overly dependent on this increasingly internet-centric way of life, or we will surely be putting both their physical, emotional and intellectual wellbeing at a serious disadvantage.
Additionally, when people are in fact going outdoors they are not experiencing nature in the same way that they used to. Individuals used to immerse themselves in nature either for the enjoyment of exploring the wilderness, letting their imagination run wild, or by simply to soaking up the silence, self-reflecting, and achieving peace of mind. Through many still embrace outdoors they are some how incapable of leaving their offices and their assignments behind them (my own mother included). When hiking in Colorado I dumbfounded by the numerous individuals I will come across checking emails on their blackberries or distraughtly searching for cell service nearly oblivious to the beautiful topography of the Rockie Mountains that surrounds them.
This is not the life I want for myself. I do not want my daily choices or activities to be dictated and dominated by what sociologist Daniel Bell refereed to as “intellectual technologies”. I want to be able to not check my email for single day without having it result in my voicemail being over flown with concerned calls and complaints. I do not want to be accessible to everyone all the time. I want time for myself. I want time with friends. I want time with my family. It saddens me that these sentimental moments and valuable conversations are constantly being interrupted and cut short by people’s inability to disconnect themselves from this increasingly internet driven world.