[ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs

[BillK]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 1:06 AM, spike wrote:
> Suddenly I discovered it is really worse than having about thirty IQ points
> whacked off, owwwww damn.  And it cuts them off the top, rather than the
> bottom.  I would let the bottom 30 go, but these top thirty IQ points are
> the smart ones.  No internet, no email, no phone.  (…no lights, no motor
> cars, not a single luxury…)  I realized I can do without lights and cars,
> because I still have candles and a bicycle and besides my computer screen
> emits light, but I cannot do without email or ESPECIALLY the internet!  I
> was to help Natasha and Max with a conference this past weekend, knew the
> address but I didn’t know where the place was, and couldn’t find out, so I
> had my neighbor google on H+ venue and she printed out the directions, but
> somehow it was the directions to Max and Natasha’s hotel.  Doh!  So I
> somehow managed to find the place using spoken word directions, oy vey!  If
> not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Lincoln would be lost.
>
>

This is the controversy about whether our gadgets, google, internet,
etc. are making us stupid.
Ref. cars driving into rivers and along railway lines because the
satnav said so.
Ref. the continuous stream of inane chatter on Facebook and Twitter.

The famous article (and book) is the 2008 story for The Atlantic
titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by author Nicholas Carr.
<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/>

Another article reviewed the state of the discussion in 2010 and
claimed 'Internet making our brains different, not dumb', but 21%
still supported Carr's thesis.
<http://www.nbcnews.com/id/35464896/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/internet-making-our-brains-different-not-dumb/>

Some Carr quotes:
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone,
or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural
circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I
can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.
I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a
book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up
in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours
strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case
anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three
pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something
else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to
the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a
struggle.

A recently published study of online research habits , conducted by
scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be
in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of
the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs
documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites,
one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational
consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and
other sources of written information. They found that people using the
sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source
to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.
They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or
book before they would “bounce” out to another site.

"What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away
from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence
and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The
price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth
in our thinking.”
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BillK