Is the internet making us stupid or the next step in human evolution?

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning. I have a pot of coffee and a pile of books by my side. All I need to do today is relax. Yet, I’m not.

There is a mechanical failure taking place in my brain that keeps niggling at me that there is something else I should be doing instead and the answer to what that is can be found online.

So I sit, expectantly with Facebook open allowing the constant thought stream of others to dominate my own. Helen has toast for breakfast and is planning on going for a run… (perhaps I should go running?) Andrew is listening to the Stone Roses… Susan just read such an such an article… Angela looooves her boyfriend so much (vomit)… Barry’s cat just coughed up a fur ball (double vomit)

It’s like a disease, this need we all feel to advertise and glamorise our day to day lives. Tell me honestly, why should I give a shit?

I am a big advocate of Facebook from the perspective it enables you to stay in touch with your friends and family around the world. It keeps you connected (on some level). It aggregates content from various sources of (arbitrary) interest making it your own person news feed...Or am I confusing it with Twitter (Don’t get me started on Twitter). But for everyone else we see it as our own personal shopping channel, using it to sell ourselves, to project our most favorable image of who we want to be perceived to be to everyone else so think we’re so cool, funny, exciting and likeable.

We use Facebook as a social support network, reaching out to others through the magic of cyber space opposed to reaching out to those around us. We replace human contact with interfacing with our interface and end up wasting hours, days and years of our life that could be spent on other, more intelligent pursuits.

Image the days before Facebook. They weren’t so long ago! We used to think of other ways to connect with one another and to spend our time. I seem to remember my grandfather saying the same thing about TV.

But where does our fascination of how one another spends their day to day moments come from? Is it because we’re so bored, so unstimulated by our own lives, so underwhelmed by our own reality that we feel the need to become part of someones by becoming a silent (or not so silent, depending on how much you comment or share) witness.

Facebook is making us all emotionally retarded because we can only express ourselves in 4 sentences or less and we compose something that is a suitable copy line for sharing.

Google, Wiki, Maps… all of it is killing brain cells and compromising our intellectual integrity because we can find instant answers. We have all of this information at our finger tips and we use it as a constant guiding source in our life, as if the internet was the creator of all everything.

Don’t know something, you Google it. Need to check some facts – go to Wiki. Can’t find somewhere – map it.

We will never ever come up with anything new is we’re all so busy searching for answers via search engines.
We have so much information available to us and we spend so much time trying to cram it all in does it not cut our creativity, the ability to think for ourselves, to rely on our own instinct and our own intelligence?

I used to have a curious fascination with Facebook and the impact it has had on modern society. It has provided us with a tool through which we’re all tangibly connected and I can’t help wondering if that is serving us as a reminder that we are all interdependent and can have a constant channel of communication & dialogue with one another – without the use of a computer - and that someday soon this concept of interconnectedness will leap off the pages of the internet and reinstate itself in our psyche.

It is suggested by certain research institutes and smart people that think about this stuff that the next step in our evolution (or devolution, depending on where you stand) is that we will all re-install and upgrade our own telepathic communication program thus rendering Mark Zuckerberg redundant. I guess we’ll see.

The internet has already affected our brains in the way that we consume information and the attention we give it. Generally we skim and filter, which is shortening our attention spans and decreasing our ability for spontaneous, deeper thinking.

There is chunky argument to suggest the media (that we create) and consume influences what we think, our attitudes and our beliefs. And, we all know that what we think we become.

Some of the most intelligent societies & civilization are those that have been cut off from mass media over the centuries and still live off their instinct, in harmony with nature. Just a thought.

Now I’ve written this I am going to post it on the internet and share it on Facebook.

I could say more - like how the internet isn’t really real – how anything digital isn’t really real – that it’s just stuff we made up to occupy us, stave off the boredom and mind numbing oblivion of our own reality and how it is just another system for ensuring the mass media message is front and centre, making us afraid and telling us what to think and how to feel to ensure we stay afraid and don’t step outside the little box we don’t realise we’re in and start questioning what life should be about and actually thinking for ourselves. We think we’re so clever to have all of this technology around us when actually the most intelligent thing we could do sometimes is turn it all off and go and sit under a fucking tree. But perhaps that would be pushing it.