[ExI] "Feral" humans, NOT

[BillK]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Eugen Leitl  wrote:
> Not just video games, electronic media in general. The result is
> beyond belief. You have no idea how bad it is. No idea.
>
> Yes, there are exceptions. There always are. They hardly matter, though.
>


This is sociology, so of course it is full of confusion,
contradictions and exceptions.

If you doubt that the decreased attention span effect exists ask the
people whose livelihood  depends on it.
Advertisers are making greater and greater efforts to get attention to
their wares.
Teachers are noticing their classes doing everything except listening
to the lecture.

The problem is that the human brain is single-stream. No multi-core
processors here.

So there are basically two methods humans use to cope with the
electronic flood of data.
1) Attempt multi-tasking.
2) Filtering the flood.


1) Leads to the 8 second attention span. Continual switching between
twitter, facebook, IMS, etc. If this becomes a permanent state, then
it is obviously counter-productive. Deep thought doesn't happen here.
This seems to apply mostly to the younger generation who have grown up
in this environment. They live in a world of continual interruptions,
always-on, updating each other on what the latest gossip is. Perhaps
they don't realise that life doesn't have to be like this and anyway,
they seem to like it that way.

2) Filtering is the solution that the older generation generally choose.
Adblock gets rid of the ads shouting at you.
Pruning the RSS feeds that you are prepared to spend time reading.
'Lifehacker' productivity solutions get applied.
Use the 80/20 rule. 80% of everything can be thrown out. Keep the 20%
useful stuff.
And so on.


BillK