BurnedOut
Your friendly neighborhood asshole
Almost all news websites and any kind of popular website promoted by Firefox or Google. I am not at all satisfied after going through an article because they are not at all challenging. This is quite different than when I was growing up and surfing the internet and quite used to getting long articles which elucidated very well but these days, I have been seeing that essays on the internet are nothing better than limericks and at the end, you are asking yourself, 'But what was the author actually trying to say?'
Turns out this is an empirical finding. I don't know what causes the media industry to presume that audience are really dumb. However, I am going to take a radically different stance this time and say that there are several things that prove that the audiences are not as dumb as they think -
1. Increasing relevance of complex music - Progressive metal, Classical music, etc
2. Increasing consumption of nonfiction. This is clearly one of the biggest breakthroughs of this era - layperson having a clear baseline understanding of political mechanisms. I have also seen this in real life wherein I had intellectual discussions with blue-collared workers or hawkers on the streets who had an impressive grasp.
3. Gaming is a widespread phenomenon. It looks like at least for male kids, nearly all of the kids today are capable of playing complex video games
4. Increasing public discourses on political and nonpolitical topics
So clearly, the public is getting intellectually better. However, Ted Gioia, a very interesting person, pointed out it is not that people are getting dumber but the media industry who is making incorrect assumptions about people's attention spans and generating dumb content - a phenomenon that has pervaded every sphere on human life. I had met my professor a month ago and we had a nice discussion. She said that it causes her a great deal of frustration whenever the state universities slash syllabi in half because they keep assuming that college kids are dumb. Therefore, it is confusing to say whether people are getting dumber or they are actively been made dumb by the media.
Given the previous paragraph, Ted also talked about his frustration working as a journalist wherein he was constantly pressurized by his superiors to reduce his word limit. He reached a breaking point when his publishers told him to write a 400 word summary for a 500 page novel.
I talk about this because internet has become very boring to surf on. When I am searching for data or information on particular topics, I end up reading several diabetically sweet articles who have identical information replicated and sometimes I have to give up because the actual data is buried very deep in the internet. It sounds insignificant, sure, but during my majors' projects submissions, it was one of the biggest pain in the arse because of the fact that I was not able to gather political data without having a million crappy news websites hindering the process. Ironically, I went from surfing on the internet to simply downloading ebooks on various topics because the former is a wasteful effort and the latter is exactly the opposite.
Now when I reminisce about our usage of internet, I can tell you that I was able to make my stuff better by exponential levels because I was using ebooks and research articles' to conduct my research while my classmates were futilely searching the internet for information. Me and them put in similar amounts of efforts but the fact that I was able to gather high-quality data without extraneous opinions and trimmings suddenly made my submission a lot better. As a matter of fact I was able to stay ahead intellectually because I used books rather than web articles. It is funny how people whom I taught using Google behaved as if they got a shot of intellectuality and their quality of work was suddenly very high. I led a group once and the simple switch from reading pop garbage to actual research papers and good works of nonfiction caused our professors to sing paeans of us.
I wonder if anybody is experiencing the same phenomenon.
A thought experiment for all of you - imagine if the internet is devoid of all kinds of social media platforms including YouTube and video and audio streaming (imagine the 90s). Would you surf the internet for hours? If I think about this, if I were a child, I would have still enjoyed the internet very much but today if such a thing happens, it will take awhile for me to get used to the new internet.
But if you really think about the usage pattern, the domination of the internet is carried out of pithy nonsense such as posting one-liner opinions which are usually negative or posting pictures or doing similar irrational nonsense. But this irrational nonsense takes up a lot more time you'd expect. I mean even on YT, you'd only watch a few channels no matter how seasoned and open minded you are simply because of the overwhelming amount of garbage that exists on it. On instagram, you'd barely post your own stuff but instead gawk at other people's shit. Extremely unchallenging and innocuous activities consume several hours of the day. This is very different than the olden days of the internet wherein I was usually browsing wikipedia, gaming forums and playing flash games and generally satiating my curiosity.
Out of curiosity, I have asked quite a lot of people regarding their leisure activities. All of them said that they lack time. None of them actually use their phone browser that much until very much required (searching a place, looking up emails, etc). Most of them listened to music dominantly with the second dominant activity being 'surfing on social media'. Several of them admitted that instagram wasted their time but none of them were serious about reducing their usage. Some of them also used dating apps 'for fun' instead of actually using them to find people. Lastly, many girls spent an inordinate amount of time organizing their photo gallery full of pictures of themselves.
Turns out this is an empirical finding. I don't know what causes the media industry to presume that audience are really dumb. However, I am going to take a radically different stance this time and say that there are several things that prove that the audiences are not as dumb as they think -
1. Increasing relevance of complex music - Progressive metal, Classical music, etc
2. Increasing consumption of nonfiction. This is clearly one of the biggest breakthroughs of this era - layperson having a clear baseline understanding of political mechanisms. I have also seen this in real life wherein I had intellectual discussions with blue-collared workers or hawkers on the streets who had an impressive grasp.
3. Gaming is a widespread phenomenon. It looks like at least for male kids, nearly all of the kids today are capable of playing complex video games
4. Increasing public discourses on political and nonpolitical topics
So clearly, the public is getting intellectually better. However, Ted Gioia, a very interesting person, pointed out it is not that people are getting dumber but the media industry who is making incorrect assumptions about people's attention spans and generating dumb content - a phenomenon that has pervaded every sphere on human life. I had met my professor a month ago and we had a nice discussion. She said that it causes her a great deal of frustration whenever the state universities slash syllabi in half because they keep assuming that college kids are dumb. Therefore, it is confusing to say whether people are getting dumber or they are actively been made dumb by the media.
Given the previous paragraph, Ted also talked about his frustration working as a journalist wherein he was constantly pressurized by his superiors to reduce his word limit. He reached a breaking point when his publishers told him to write a 400 word summary for a 500 page novel.
I talk about this because internet has become very boring to surf on. When I am searching for data or information on particular topics, I end up reading several diabetically sweet articles who have identical information replicated and sometimes I have to give up because the actual data is buried very deep in the internet. It sounds insignificant, sure, but during my majors' projects submissions, it was one of the biggest pain in the arse because of the fact that I was not able to gather political data without having a million crappy news websites hindering the process. Ironically, I went from surfing on the internet to simply downloading ebooks on various topics because the former is a wasteful effort and the latter is exactly the opposite.
Now when I reminisce about our usage of internet, I can tell you that I was able to make my stuff better by exponential levels because I was using ebooks and research articles' to conduct my research while my classmates were futilely searching the internet for information. Me and them put in similar amounts of efforts but the fact that I was able to gather high-quality data without extraneous opinions and trimmings suddenly made my submission a lot better. As a matter of fact I was able to stay ahead intellectually because I used books rather than web articles. It is funny how people whom I taught using Google behaved as if they got a shot of intellectuality and their quality of work was suddenly very high. I led a group once and the simple switch from reading pop garbage to actual research papers and good works of nonfiction caused our professors to sing paeans of us.
I wonder if anybody is experiencing the same phenomenon.
A thought experiment for all of you - imagine if the internet is devoid of all kinds of social media platforms including YouTube and video and audio streaming (imagine the 90s). Would you surf the internet for hours? If I think about this, if I were a child, I would have still enjoyed the internet very much but today if such a thing happens, it will take awhile for me to get used to the new internet.
But if you really think about the usage pattern, the domination of the internet is carried out of pithy nonsense such as posting one-liner opinions which are usually negative or posting pictures or doing similar irrational nonsense. But this irrational nonsense takes up a lot more time you'd expect. I mean even on YT, you'd only watch a few channels no matter how seasoned and open minded you are simply because of the overwhelming amount of garbage that exists on it. On instagram, you'd barely post your own stuff but instead gawk at other people's shit. Extremely unchallenging and innocuous activities consume several hours of the day. This is very different than the olden days of the internet wherein I was usually browsing wikipedia, gaming forums and playing flash games and generally satiating my curiosity.
Out of curiosity, I have asked quite a lot of people regarding their leisure activities. All of them said that they lack time. None of them actually use their phone browser that much until very much required (searching a place, looking up emails, etc). Most of them listened to music dominantly with the second dominant activity being 'surfing on social media'. Several of them admitted that instagram wasted their time but none of them were serious about reducing their usage. Some of them also used dating apps 'for fun' instead of actually using them to find people. Lastly, many girls spent an inordinate amount of time organizing their photo gallery full of pictures of themselves.
