Raised by the internet for behavioral slavery

A friend was recently telling that his young teenage son hasn't the ability to pay attention and sit through a full-length movie and will avoid it, as it is just too large of a time investment in one go. However, the same boy can sit for many hours on end watching YouTube videos of the most mundane things, one auto-play after another.

I see this as a symptom of the digital world of content consumption we have created that has punished depth and encouraged fast and shallow, easy to consume content. While the internet is the most comprehensive resource mankind has ever had access to, it has been engineered to reward the feeling of knowing over the development of knowledge itself.

As I have mentioned before, I think there is a fair amount of Dunning-Kruger effect encouraged where on very small amounts of information, the sense of depth and competence, and therefore confidence, is felt. Combine this with the inability to concentrate for longer periods of time (even for a two-hour film) and there are other problems that will arise.

When it comes to skill development, most skills that hold value to the world take time and investment to develop, as well as the ability to concentrate energy and resources to their attainment. It doesn't really matter if it is a physical or a mental skill, to improve toward mastery takes effort.

In a comment chain with @thedarkhorse, he mentioned about doing other things while watching TV or similar, something that is very common these days. However, it is pretty well understood that for the extreme majority of us, multitasking is an ineffective practice and the splitting of attention means that none of what is being attended to gets adequately performed. For an easy read on the subject, here is a link you can follow.

I will take a quote from that text to illustrate my next point:

Many surgeons say that their most loved environment in the hospital is the operating room, despite the stress and risk inherent with the job. It is a place of isolation, a safe home from the multitasking world

Anyone who has a skill that they are able to focus on or "get lost in" at times has experienced a flow state where like the surgeon, there is a challenge and stress, but the skillset is adequate to stretch for completion. Flow is an addictive feeling and when one must continually ramp up the challenge to feel it, skill improvement is guaranteed, all the way up to mastery. However, splitting the attention breaks the flow state and ensures very little improvement happens.

Yet when it comes to the consumptive habits of the internet with shallow, low-value content that is passively consumed at speed, very little can be learned. There is the adage, "a picture tells 100 words" but I do not believe that this is the case in a world where the thumb scroll never pauses longer than to double tap a heart on Instagram. For information to have learning value, it must be considered consciously unless what is learned is injected in unknowingly.

What is really being learnt through passive consumption of shallow internet content could be an engineered position that nudges users away from skill development by giving the feedback that something is being learned, whilst supporting the concentration and attention habits that will steer the viewer away from this very discovery. It is teaching us where to look, what to learn and how to behave and perhaps, this is a good thing.

I do not think it is a good thing for individual humans, but with the increased automation and AI pressures taking an increasing number of jobs, the competition on skilled work and especially the creative forms is likely to be greater than most can manage. In the past, school was the "weeding process" for skillsets for the employee workforce, perhaps the internet is the filter for the future.

Being a good consumer of information and applications doesn't mean one has the skills to apply or create those same things and without the ability to concentrate, learn and develop necessary skills, one will not be able to compete anyway. Maybe the bar for the future is being increased through behavioral change so only those who are able to apply themselves to improving themselves will have access to some potentials. Those who are unable to delay gratification, focus attention and stick through a process for a long-term result will be squeezed into the much larger box of consumer class.

There are obviously going to be skills that are gained from performing alternate tasks that didn't exist prior, like actions and understanding of the internet ecosystem, but the challenge is going to be not to degrade other necessary skill areas. Competitive cognitive artefacts are tools that compete and replace our very abilities to think and if we are losing out to algorithms we are not even aware exist, like the auto-play of YouTube and "pre-curated" feeds of Facebook, we may not even recognize we are losing something.

However for the children growing in this world today, they are not losing, because they are yet to obtain some of the skills and what we are doing through encouraging or allowing certain behaviors, could be retarding their abilities in the future, without even knowing that is what we are doing at all.

This loss of skill mentioned doesn't even touch upon the skills of human interaction that creates connection and attraction between people, the skills to read a face and hands to predict intention or build trust or, the potentially fundamental need for humans to have some sense of purpose in order to feel that life is worth living. That can be for another day.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]