I’m not going to do the research on this, I’ve had a long day of being jumped on by second graders and I’m beat, but I had an interesting thought today and here it is:
It's All Connected
If you were to do an analysis on how much time people spend doing what online – how much on games, how much watching videos of kittens on Youtube, how much time shopping, how much time on social networks, how much time on porn, etc…, you would wind up with a macrocosmic view of the human psyche, the breakdown would be precisely the same as the average human being.
(I suspect we are, deep down, well…I don’t suspect we go deep down)
It is inevitable, it is by definition. What goes into this tangled web of information (and misinformation), goes in via billions of madly typing little fingers, controlled by billions, or at least hundreds of millions, of individual minds. That large a sample, the poll approaches statistical certainty.
So, at least, as we move towards this artificial intelligence/group mind thing which seems to be the next step of human evolution, we know that the supergenius robots who will rule the world in the future will be just like us. For better or worse.
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I don’t know… we behave so differently online, to the extent that a breakdown of what we collectively click on could never hope to accurately represent what’s really going on inside, to say nothing of what our imagination is capable of.
Online, it can seem as if the only thing to captivate us is the next thing: the next link, the next headline, the next post. Out in the real world, it’s very different; something as simple as the sun on my face as I sit on a park bench can keep me happily tethered for some minutes, even with little or no infostimulation streaming in.
The mind represented by such a web-generated mind-map would represent humans at our shallowest, clicking like mad in a desperate bid to replace what’s missing, when of course the only way to get it back is to shut down the damn ‘lectronics and get back to really living.
Thanks for the perspective. I think I spend too much time online.
Oh, c’mon. This should be well established by now. Call it “low hanging fruit”, among others, but it’s just another example of the Bell Curve. The greatest concentration is going to be within a standard deviation. If you want anything interesting, you have to go outside that box.
And I’d love to go back to 1992, when my own was in second grade. On the other hand, I enjoy my grand-daughter who’s a first grader. I’m still young enough that I can chase her around. Enjoy it while you can: they grow like weeds.