Information Apocalypse
ERT : 4 minutes
What the Fuck is this?
According to some scholars, living in the 21st century is the best time to be alive. I mean, think about it, we have everything at our disposal. You can talk to a person living on the other side of the world, hear an orchestral musical performance that happened decades ago, watch a sport that is being played thousands of miles away, or learn anything from anyone you want if you don’t like your imbecile college classes.
In particular, as of now, as a species; we have more resources to read, reflect on, process and interpret than any of our ancestor’s counterparts in history. But there is a cache. This environment gives us more materialistic resources and longest lives than those enjoyed by any of our previous generations, but somehow it often makes us feel alienated, confused, overwhelmed, depressed, and pressured.
But why is it so? Why can’t we get enough of all the resources? Why can’t we remember that tip from a well-being article describing the progressing ways to be focused and more productive? Why can’t we read an entire article without getting distracted? Why many of us can’t recollect the facts from a book we just read recently!? Why do we have a colossal desire to look at what others are doing in their lives through social media? Why does our YouTube watch later playlist contains enough videos to answer all these whys but we are still searching for that one magic pill to solve all our problems?
The answer is the behemoth amount of information available at our fingertips and our brains haven’t evolved to be able to process it all.
From a YouTube recommendation of “How to become a successful entrepreneur,” to an influencer teaching you the fundamentals of cryptocurrency; Never ending feed on Social media platforms or an article about the benefits of yoga somewhere on the deserted internet site; or a morning newsletter from a productivity guru telling you how reading books can make you next Bill gates to a notification pop-up on your phone screen and last but not least, a recommendation email from a premium porn site telling you about their newest state-of-the-art. The list goes on and it is never intended to stop.
Why the fuck is this?
But isn’t the very true instance of the 21st century? Of course, the amount of information contained and distributed within a few clicks helped us a lot to grow in our respective domains. But since the German artisan Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1468, human minds are absorbing information like a sponge. Later on, when information was digitalized, you could virtually get any information within clicks.
To understand it in particular, let’s hop into our primitive ancestors from prehistoric times. Some anthropologists are not sure if our DNA is too much evolved over the last thousands of years. That means our genome is very much similar to our ancestors dating back to ancient human relatives such as Neanderthals (Homo Sapiens’ closest biological relatives). That conveys that we as a species bypassed the original wall of biological evolution, the way we do things, the way we react, or the way we process the information hasn’t changed a lot for the last couple of millennia. From the hunter-gatherers of Africa to the farmers in Indonesia and now the modern us, we all three kinds share very similar brain structures besides the progression in technology and lifestyle changes.
This brings us to our reasoning for why can’t we process a lot of information!! From the scientific studies, a human body sends 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to process only 50 bits per second. That’s 0.00045 percent somewhere. That certainly means you can’t remember what I told you at the beginning of this article. See, you don’t!!”
To whom may it concern!
From picking up your phone in the morning to set an alarm for the next day, information is flooded in your brain and the content rushes at us in countless formats. A tweet from Elon musk about his new pet, Facebook birthday alerts, and emails from Amazon about your recommendation. They all are part of this. So it’s a lot of stuff, but what’s the problem?
Just as a detour, I would like to mention lithium-ion battery (The one which is used in most of our electrical appliances) Lithium-ion batteries degrade over time even when they are not used, and when I say degrade I am more into its efficiency to provide your appliances the better battery life. If you use your appliances more harshly, the Li-on battery will degrade much faster. We charge our appliances; we use them; they discharged again and that vivacious circle repeats and in meantime, our Li-on batteries degrade. Cool. So what is the point?
Hypothetically, our brains are very much similar to Li-on batteries. When the abundant amount of information arrives combined with the personal and societal expectations to answer every message and text spontaneously, it’s like Li-on batteries in our appliances are rushing at their full throttle, and if you do so repeatedly, your battery, I mean your brain will degrade much faster than you can ever imagine.
How to manage this shit!
Better asked, it’s not about the information apocalypse. It’s a failure of having a filter. Create a filter that abides by your needs, your domain, your work, your entertainment, your curiosities, your intellectual pursuits, your boredom, your problems, and your solutions, and examine those filters on the regular basis. I tried to come up with an acceptable or righteous filter model for everyone, but I guess everyone has different priorities and different lives, which means it’s only you who can decide what suits you best. That’s all for this time. Until then
पर्यावरण बचाओ पृथ्वी बचाओ. आवजो.
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