eliel danie

IMAGINE THE WORLD WITHOUT INTERNET

once you start looking for it you'll never be able to stop seeing it everywhere you go when's the last time you've walked into a restaurantand saw an entire table of friends on their phone or a group of people on the street or maybe even your family in the morning each content to be in their own world nearly unaware of the reality around them if the majority of human interaction is non-verbal what would happen if you removed everything but that small remainder for over a decade as it turns outthat's the very experiment that we're living in today i remember when i was growing up way back in the day a prehistoric time before everyone had acell phone and computers were named after the year they were made inokay i'm not quite a dinosaur yet but i grew up in a unique timewhere half of my childhood was without the major technology and platforms thatseemed to rule parts of our lives today and the other half of my childhood was rapidly sling shotted into the new age of technologyi remember from the earlier half of my childhood life seemed different especially human interaction if you wanted to talk with someone you had no other option but to physically go out and find the and spend uninterrupted time with them in the same room and while you were there there was nothing pulling your attention away nothing in the back of your mind reminding you that there are hundreds of other peoplesharing information that you might be missing out on that degree of presence practice day inand day out created a different richness to human interaction with intricacies and nuances that seems to be slowly and gradually lost the further we progress into this new age of technological advancement and with the meteoric rise in popularity for documentaries like the socialdilemma it's safe to say that this is a growing sentiment and realization within today's culture the terrifying crux to the problem isactually quite simple there's a massive mismatch between therate of adaptation and advancement between our biology and technologybecause of the law of accelerating returns the pace of advancement ininformation technology is exponential and while technology continues to growat a rapid pace we're left still trying to figure out how it actually impacts usespecially when we're teaching algorithms to predict and modulate our behavior i don't think that anyone's denying that social media as well as instant communication is extremely addictive this world we live in estimated 3.5 billion people across the world access online services the top three countries were China with 721 million users followed by India and then the US with 290 million users by far themost common language used online is English followed by Chinese and Spanish the reliance on using the Internet is clearly changing across generations mainly depending on those who had to adapt to the new technology or those who grew up with that being readily accessibleGeneration X Internet users who were born between the mid 1960s and early 1980s logged an average of a hundred and ten minutes of mobile internet usage each day while Millennials who were born from the early 80s onward and grew upwith the internet locked in the average of a hundred and eighty five minutes per day our beautiful world with endless discoveries day by day indeed needs innovation; social media and messaging apps have become crucial to how we live our lives and communicate with more than a billion people regularly using apps like whatsapp and even more using platforms such as Facebook and Twitter now with increasing use of Internet services it seems only natural that our behavior is changing as well communication throughthese platforms is far more common whichmeans phone calls and text messages are dropping in popularity and the use of online shopping and services has caused a sharp decline in the uses of traditional high street stores our towns and cities are starting to look very different to a few decades ago and this can all be attributed to what's now available online so how is all this affecting our brains with such a wealth of information at our fingertips the prevalence of the Internet is changing away our work millenials for example have been found to be far more forgetful thanprevious generations this is thought to be a direct result of the constant distractions that connectivity brings the basic principle behind memory is that the more a piece of information is repeated and thought about in yourshort-term memory the stronger its stored within your long-term memory constant new information however prevents this process from taking place as effectively and far less is permanently stored further to this the knowledge that information is readily available online means that you're less likely to form a memory of it while previous generations would have memorized directions on a map for example now there's a reliance on being able to access this GPS app , we're also becoming more addicted to our smartphones constant glances to check for messages where updates means that we're becoming more and more used to developing a habit of being distracted our brains are less used to transitioning into deeper modes of thinking which makes it more difficult to do this when we need to some research has also shown that the constant flow ofinformation has meant that we are losing cognitive control this means not only is our ability to control our minds reducing but also our ability to decide what we're thinking about the more you rely on your phone and an app to to you the less you are able to determine what's important to focus on we are increasingly more concerned with information that's new as opposed to what's actually important so what canbe done although technology is clearly affecting the way our brains work it's not necessarily a bad thing throughout history inventions have always enabled us to focus less on one thing so our time can be used somewhere else