Constant exposure to information ruins ability to create, think independently
The prevalence of technology is obvious in all of our lives, but what’s been eating me is how our dependence on technology to remember anything that we deem memorable is beginning to affect our brains.
Social media allows you to say whatever is on your mind with Twitter, show whatever interesting thing is happening with Instagram or “stay connected” with your distant friends and acquaintances with Facebook.
All of these applications promise more immediate connection with people and easily shared art or knowledge. Both are admirable pursuits when sought after for those reasons. But the line between beneficial and destructive are blurred when we begin to see pictures of meals, posts describing observations of menial, daily tasks and the overflow of ever-shameless selfie shots.
It’s scientifically proven that our brain can only hold so much information, so we try to expand our mental capacities by taking pictures or videos that can easily be referenced later. But what happens to the short memory we have when it’s flooded with inane pictures of girls holding Starbucks cups or another beautiful Columbia sunset?
This problem isn’t just one that affects how we learn — it affects how we remember everything. When we assume we’ll remember some beautiful thing if we take a picture of it, we dump the responsibility into our phone’s memory card and often forget what it looked like firsthand. It starts to become difficult to explain things to a friend because after a few tries it’s easier to just revert to our phones for a Facebook profile or picture. With our reliance on technology, the beauty of a creative description is rendered unnecessary, and our imagination suffers most.
Perhaps this is also one of the reasons our generation is often labeled as apathetic. We have the capability of seeing beautiful, thought-provoking images immediately, and after so many we become unimpressed. American author and journalist James Gleick sums it up well by saying, “When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.” My dad’s worn-out joke, “I’m too poor to even pay attention,” suddenly sounds less like a joke. While we’re all wealthy enough to buy new smartphones, we’ve made a trade-off too subtle to notice. Those little screens have robbed us of our attention span, our interest in the pure pursuit of knowledge and, in many cases, our originality.
As Gleick says, “Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.” Of course the pursuit of wisdom has always been considered a higher cause, but will our generation choose to rise up to that cause, or will we remain satisfied with the ingenuity of being able to apply different filters to our pictures as our cognitive workout for the day?