Do You Miss Your Pre-Internet Brain?

[Burnt State]

Human's are still the best transferring agents of knowledge and information. In their peer to peer packet sharing of conversation, whole novels, branches of science, and entire histories of cultures can be explained face to face in faster time than any other method. We are wondrous amazing organic machines, miraculous in our capacities and endlessly imaginative about, well, everything really. What area of knowledge pursuits have we not made progress in?

I fear our passive approach to technology, especially those born into the digital medium, may be a limiting experience. But there are always outliers, always those in the gene pool that push our inventions in directions unknown and create new modes of thinking and communicating that will exceed previous capacities and methodologies in ways unimaginable. I can see a time where I will not be able to communicate with potential future grandchildren as new languages and modes of technology continue to reinvent themselves.

 

[manxman]

Michael Crichton said it all about the net, it has certainly been fully embraced by our 'leaders'


“When we allow science to become political then we are lost. We will enter the internet version of the Dark Ages, an era of stifling fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better.”


I would still miss it tho.

 

[boomerang]

I should balance my previous comments about potential dangers of information overload. Individual and group isolation and insular ignorance have a way of spawning their own kind of maladjustment leading to neurotic and insensitive attitudes. Picture the classic scene of ye olden peasants with lanterns and pitchforks. Or the witch trial from Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

Too much or too little of anything is harmful. The issue is more akin to quality info vs unsolicited noise overload.

Garbage in---cognitive and emotional garbage out.

 

[Burnt State]

I should balance my previous comments about potential dangers of information overload. Individual and group isolation and insular ignorance have a way of spawning their own kind of maladjustment leading to neurotic and insensitive attitudes. Picture the classic scene of ye olden peasants with lanterns and pitchforks. Or the witch trial from Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

Too much or too little of anything is harmful. The issue is more akin to quality info vs unsolicited noise overload.

Garbage in---cognitive and emotional garbage out.

I closed off the last day before March break with a conversation in my class on sexting & corporate consumer culture: who makes the media? What kind of media do teens make online with their current tools? What's the value of being original and having your own thoughts vs. the Disneyfied version of human relations? These were some of the talking points that opened them up to exploring the mediated reality of the 21st century. It promoted two students to say, "Sir, i was so close to shutting down my Facebook account." "Me too," says another. "But I just couldn't do it." "Me neither," says the girl beside him, and I slammed my fist on the table, and I said joyfully, "Do it! Leave Facebook behind! Free yourself! You can do it!"

We had a great close out to the week. There's nothing like watching young minds getting turned on by free thinking and start on the path of critiquing their banal parts of culture, their media stereotyping, and gaining an awareness of the physical and mental diseases that come with listening to the marketing messages of personal inadequacy and low self-esteem, that apparently only products will cure them of. The young mind does succumb to a lot of cognitive dissonance in our digital era, this human experiment on our well-being.

You know, kids sext all the time despite the many warnings, talks, and explanations of the costs of creating and distributing child pornography, which the current laws in North America define these practices as. Some kids now just make porn and produce it for the web, to share with friends, not to make money in the online pornography industry, but just as a replication of the media they consume online already. It's more than bizarre, but understandable, as some kid would make a sci fi film with their dad's Super8 camera in the 70's, only these new provacative products are much more disturbing indicators.

What's difficult as a teacher, who likes to disrupt consumer culture with fostering independent critical skills, is that before I've even got a handle on sexting's evolution I know I need to turn my brain to the De-Radicalization of the teen male psyche that sees extremism (joining ISIS & rape culture) as their only trajectory. It's a very fast paced world. Everything changes in an instant. This young Canadian male, with no real familial ties to Islam, decided to go Jihadi and give up playing street hockey, threatening his former homeland from abroad instead - simply surreal.

I try to juxtapose and contradict these sudden shifts and mental health issues with teaching kids how to practice meditation, engage in mindfulness practice and make media products that critique the world around them, to introduce their own ideas into the digital world.

I stumbled into this advice to youth piece from my favourite Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky. While his ideas may appear quaint, there's some big truths in here about cultivating an individual, and creative way of being with oneself, stimulated by nature, and not the razzed dazzle of modern life. There's an integrity to this way of thinking.

 

[Tyger]

What's difficult as a teacher, who likes to disrupt consumer culture with fostering independent critical skills, is that before I've even got a handle on sexting's evolution I know I need to turn my brain to the De-Radicalization of the teen male psyche that sees extremism (joining ISIS & rape culture) as their only trajectory. It's a very fast paced world. Everything changes in an instant. This young Canadian male, with no real familial ties to Islam, decided to go Jihadi and give up playing street hockey, threatening his former homeland from abroad instead - simply surreal.

I try to juxtapose and contradict these sudden shifts and mental health issues with teaching kids how to practice meditation, engage in mindfulness practice and make media products that critique the world around them, to introduce their own ideas into the digital world.

A life lived without what is real. Adults never penetrating beyond the veil - as politeness demands - so all are free. But for a young person, they crave what is real - and all they get is junk food for the soul. The young male wants to go where it is real, where life is on the edge. We forget how much children need to be physically touched and held.

I wonder - did the above young adult play violent video games? I have a hunch about these games like minecraft.

 

[Burnt State]

A life lived without what is real. Adults never penetrating beyond the veil - as politeness demands - so all are free. But for a young person, they crave what is real - and all they get is junk food for the soul. The young male wants to go where it is real, where life is on the edge. We forget how much children need to be physically touched and held.

I wonder - did the above young adult play violent video games? I have a hunch about these games like minecraft.

The options kids get are thin and mostly limited or evil. What's sold to boys and girls as what they should be is mostly tragic. Though two interesting features of life on the Internet: never before have kids been able to choose from such a high diversity of entertainment or infotainment media products - everyone is making things and so there's a chance of a new democratizing of the media where we choose & kids are seeing themselves as potential creators, making new products that don't always have to be emulative or trending, with incredibly sophisticated and liberating tools, by some Internet pioneers whose voices are equally liberating.

Not all gaming is mind numbing, but a lot of it is - see Gamergate.

But yes, that need for kids to live in the physical world is critical, right from the get go they need their hugs, and they need their love and support from those that matter to them. Will this generation find a new kind of digital nurturance and will it be as vital? The experiment is unfolding as we type.

 

[Constance]

Privacy, individuality and superficiality are the main themes I'm seeing unfold - a culture of short buzzes and tweets. With total exposure comes a kind of Orwellian emptiness, or a Brave New World soma induced coma of consumption and production, work and commodified plastic pleasure, all in digital packets from the new vending machine of human experience. The hive is an overstimulated horny buzzing bunch of mindless drones. That future has no appeal for me and seems to be an erosion of our physicality, our use of memory and the loss of the reflective individual. I see nothing sensual about it.

An appalling diagnosis with which I agree completely. The internet (much as I appreciate the access it enables to major works of human thought and contemporary critical thinking at significant levels concerning ourselves, our history, our societies, our future) operates in general at a much lower common denominator affecting the young in exactly the ways you have described. 'Virtual reality' is not reality; it is in general in flight from -- in its effort to replace -- the lived existential reality naturally experienced by our species in a physical world that exists in temporal change -- and which temporality is by now comprehensible to us as our condition {carrying consequent obligations} as a result of the evolution of consciousness and mind in our species. I'm talking about 'the human condition' adequately examined, which our contemporary popular culture is eager to escape, having been persuaded by the AI technocrats that being human is an embarrassment that we should erase from existence as soon as possible. The least we can do, before that species suicide is brought about, is to understand what's going on and why, and especially what is at stake.

 

[Tyger]

I'm going to slightly disagree. I see enormous depth in my students - 7th graders. As we approach human reproduction in Physiology, I have introduced the study of the 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi. They are soaking up his poetry like salt-and-water on a thirsty day.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”
― Rumi

“Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.”
― Rumi

“My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
― Rumi

“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
― Rumi

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

And I could go on and on - as they do - poring over his mystical insights, drenched in his loving humanity. I sometimes wonder if their quiet pensiveness is a sensing of what is to come, what they will have to deal with - for it is a complicated world they are being served up. As we explore the complexities of algebraic graphing and the boys start talking about needing to know graphing if one is to be a 'navy seal ', my heart sinks. In 6 years will these boys be signing up to fight in some ill-conceived war in some far distant land, from which they will return blasted and ruined for the rest of their lives? I hope not.

 

[Burnt State]

I'm going to slightly disagree. I see enormous depth in my students - 7th graders. As we approach human reproduction in Physiology, I have introduced the study of the 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi. They are soaking up his poetry like salt-and-water on a thirsty day.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”
― Rumi

“Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.”
― Rumi

“My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
― Rumi

“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
― Rumi

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

And I could go on and on - as they do - poring over his mystical insights, drenched in his loving humanity. I sometimes wonder if their quiet pensiveness is a sensing of what is to come, what they will have to deal with - for it is a complicated world they are being served up. As we explore the complexities of algebraic graphing and the boys start talking about needing to know graphing if one is to be a 'navy seal ', my heart sinks. In 6 years will these boys be signing up to fight in some ill-conceived war in some far distant land, from which they will return blasted and ruined for the rest of their lives? I hope not.

Thanks for my start up lesson after I come back from the break. I've been teaching so much Plath this past semester that I almost forgot about how rejuvenating the poetry that fills the heart and body can be.

Re: boys signing up for war...whenever I have a young man who is interested in either policing or being a soldier I take some time to have some separate conversations outside of class about the how's and why's of those choices just to make sure that there is clarity of conscience behind the motive. Understanding what it means, "to serve and protect" is a very big deal, ultimate career choice in some ways and I respect those who perform this job as an act of conscience. Just today as i was coming out of the market I wished two officers a safe and trouble free week, which is what they were hoping for too.

Those who see this job as a default position, just the thing to do in a life of few choices usually wash out early on or can't even make it to the foundation courses.

As for the nature of the war they go to fight where old men make decisions about where young women and men will die is another matter altogether. Everyone is functioning as ants in the hive in their own way (ok well maybe not "everyone" as my infrequent nihilism suspects) and I'm glad when I remember that, "My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there. In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”

Sounds good, in fact I'm going to go do that right now.

 

[Burnt State]

An appalling diagnosis with which I agree completely. The internet (much as I appreciate the access it enables to major works of human thought and contemporary critical thinking at significant levels concerning ourselves, our history, our societies, our future) operates in general at a much lower common denominator affecting the young in exactly the ways you have described. 'Virtual reality' is not reality; it is in general in flight from -- in its effort to replace -- the lived existential reality naturally experienced by our species in a physical world that exists in temporal change -- and which temporality is by now comprehensible to us as our condition {carrying consequent obligations} as a result of the evolution of consciousness and mind in our species. I'm talking about 'the human condition' adequately examined, which our contemporary popular culture is eager to escape, having been persuaded by the AI technocrats that being human is an embarrassment that we should erase from existence as soon as possible. The least we can do, before that species suicide is brought about, is to understand what's going on and why, and especially what is at stake.

I would use the Consciousness and Paranormal thread as a case in point. I learn more there than anywhere else on the web and you seem to pull ideas like pixels with ease and grace right out of a few simple key strokes.

Agree wholeheartedly on all points about living in the real world.

When I think of the kids I have taught whose minds are fully on they have certain commonalities: families that love them, a real creative drive, a mind that is sparking with curiosity, they have lived in the real world with real people and engage in real conversations; they have a passion for life.

This is a very different calibre of people I imagine that would sit at home and play with Baby X.

 

[Constance]

Thank you for your encouraging comments, Burnt.

 

[Constance]

I'm going to slightly disagree. I see enormous depth in my students - 7th graders. As we approach human reproduction in Physiology, I have introduced the study of the 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi. They are soaking up his poetry like salt-and-water on a thirsty day.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”
― Rumi

“Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.”
― Rumi

“My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
― Rumi

“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
― Rumi

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

And I could go on and on - as they do - poring over his mystical insights, drenched in his loving humanity. I sometimes wonder if their quiet pensiveness is a sensing of what is to come, what they will have to deal with - for it is a complicated world they are being served up. As we explore the complexities of algebraic graphing and the boys start talking about needing to know graphing if one is to be a 'navy seal ', my heart sinks. In 6 years will these boys be signing up to fight in some ill-conceived war in some far distant land, from which they will return blasted and ruined for the rest of their lives? I hope not.

I'm glad to hear about your seventh graders, Tyger. I don't doubt that there are great numbers of the young out there who are sensitized and guided well by their parents and teachers -- especially when they have well-educated and committed teachers like you and Burnt. I also think that conscious beings are by nature curious about the world, serious about themselves, and drawn to exploring the world in its history and variety and its meaning. What I meant in my comment above --

I'm talking about 'the human condition' adequately examined, which our contemporary popular culture is eager to escape, having been persuaded by the AI technocrats that being human is an embarrassment that we should erase from existence as soon as possible. --

is that contemporary popular culture, for the young and young adults as well, provides so little inspiration and support for personal growth and exploration of the significance and meaning and beauty that humans have developed out of the human condition in the past. Even the generation represented by most people posting in this forum grew up in the shadow of nuclear war -- of course we still live under it and now under further global ecological threats. In the last 30-40 years we have also observed increasing senselessness in the way our species deals with life, our own and that of all the other living creatures on this planet. There are fewer and fewer hopes among the young that they will find genuinely fulfilling work in their lives and relationships that last a lifetime and peace in which to enjoy them. What's on offer has for decades now been escapism, into mindless and usually heartless entertainment that feeds neither the mind nor the soul, and acquisitiveness inspired by endless advertising of stuff that doesn't actually satisfy deep human needs. And the young are uniquely vulnerable to the empty values sold along with the consumer goods. I think Western popular culture has become increasingly cynical and nihilistic, to the point where many young adults seem to think that post-humanism via the 'Singularity' that replaces humans with machines is a cool idea. Certainly not all of them, but enough to be concerning, as I see it.

 

[Burnt State]

Jeez, all three of us agreeing on something. That hasn't happened in a while. This calls for a special glass. Bartender, make mine a double please.

 

[Constance]

I'll drink to that.

 

[Tyger]

Jeez, all three of us agreeing on something. That hasn't happened in a while. This calls for a special glass. Bartender, make mine a double please.

I'm just being polite.

 

[Constance]

No reason not to have a drink together, though. Cheers, Tyger.

 

[AlienEsq]

I was a 90's kid and fondly remember the pre-internet days of my youth. It's only gotten worse for people younger than I, and even some from my generation are stuck in it too.

Nobody reads "real books" anymore and you can't have a conversation with someone without them either staring at their cell phone or simply having it on their person.

I'd hate to sound like a crotchety old man here, but kids today aren't prepared to live out the rest of their days without constant Internet connectivity. The only reason I even have a cell is because of my job; otherwise, I'd throw this thing in a river. But the kids, they gotta have them phones.

 

[Burnt State]

I was a 90's kid and fondly remember the pre-internet days of my youth. It's only gotten worse for people younger than I, and even some from my generation are stuck in it too.

Nobody reads "real books" anymore and you can't have a conversation with someone without them either staring at their cell phone or simply having it on their person.

I'd hate to sound like a crotchety old man here, but kids today aren't prepared to live out the rest of their days without constant Internet connectivity. The only reason I even have a cell is because of my job; otherwise, I'd throw this thing in a river. But the kids, they gotta have them phones.

There's no question that digital life is making some permanent alterations in what it means to be social with others & what it means to communicate and share. I think deep down our feelings are still the same about these wondrous moments of human interaction but introducing devices inbetween you and another person has created dramatic paradigm shifts. If you never ever had to wait for a letter to come in the mail, as a response to carefully chosen words you penned yourself on paper to another then you know what I'm talking about. Our entire emotional architecture reagarding conversation has changed radically as now our emotions are always immediate, rarely prolonged & instant gratification rules all.

Here's an interesting look at happiness by way of those who engage in deeper conversations than just sipping up tweets and likes: Happy People Talk More Seriously - Scientific American

 

[Burnt State]

Communication is also cultural and I notice that depending on who is talking the idea of taking turns in conversation, pauses, reflection, contemplation and then continuity in the conversation can be very different. Digital communication strikes me as being North American Male - lots of thrusts and interruptions of brief points. Talking with women is very different than this; while, liming with Isalanders is just one prolonged afternoon of convo & tropical drinks. The Danes, who are apparently some of the happiest people on earth; in fact happiness can be measured by your distance from Danish culture, find their joy in how they converse with one another. This seems to be the antithesis to brief internet chatter.
Nordic Conversations Are Different | VirtualWayfarer

 

[Burnt State]

I teach leadership courses in high school and spend a lot of time with youth reflecting on life in digital culture and how they will interface with the rest of society as they grow into adults. I warn them that asking for raises, quitting jobs and calling in sick for work is not something one should do over email even though a substantial part of their generation is good with that way of thinking.

I ask them to consider the value of good conversation and how ideas germinate in environments (gossip in friendship circles, scientific discoveries, speaking up in tutorial sessions, corporate culture development). We look at environments where email has been disabled in favour of face to face conversation in companies in order to breed familiarity, intimacy, unity of cause and creative new approaches. I worry about how digital culture trims and excludes, or can't accurately integrate, emotion in dialogue with others. Emoticons are simply not all there is to life. Digital culture requires a different way of doing what we've always done - innovate, but to keep our humanity intact I think we need different, more sophisticated training about our differences and commonalities.

Leadership Is a Conversation - HBR

This paper is really an exceptionally beautiful document about Human Intimacy in the digital age:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~jackylee/publication/humanintimacy-muffin.pdf