Your technology is rewiring your brain

In the days of the good old industrial revolution, technology was a means of shifting things beyond the realm of human and animal strength to that of industrious machines. While no horse ever born could pull 10000 tons worth of steel in a single journey, steam engines could huff and puff their way out of much larger workloads with ease. Thus technology was hailed as a harbinger of human evolution and his taming of seemingly impossible tasks by nature. "OIL WAS THE NEW GOLD !"

Almost a century later, any mechanical feat was possible, man had been on the moon and back, all because of the basic principles of chemical energy entrapment and utilization, a la , rocketry and propulsion. The microprocessor, a tiny but astounding invention had literally helped humans stay on trajectory for their dear lives back to earth. This technology had purpose, it was in the background and like all good technology was assistive and not distractive.

About half a century later still , this is no longer the case. While the world, and especially enterprise technology visionaries glean in the new found applications of data generating endpoints and data churning server farms, the narrative of "DATA IS THE NEW GOLD" carries a much darker side, one few, if any are willing to talk about.

The Internet or the Interweb ?

Originally the Internet or the Interweb was designed to rapidly exchange information between disparate computer systems and was a result of close collaboration between DARPA and Military agencies as their use cases proved literally war winning, a la, the Enigma computer case of Alan Turing. The Modern Interweb however, thrives on keeping the end user sucked in, constantly generating data, sorting them into cohorts for hyper-targetted marketing ad campaigns. The reason is simple, the web costs money to operate and what better way to target 3.5 Billion Eyes 24/7 than the websites and app ecosystems they constantly use ? The downside ?

By design these systems are rewiring how you think ! Remember being able to sit down and read a book for hours at an end ? That's no longer the case according to this study. While the study shows only a 50% decline from recorded attention spans from 2000 till 2015, it maybe even worse now.

Organisations like Instagram, Flipboard and yes even LinkedIn are latching on to the newly formed human addiction to read bite sized bits of information that really don't promote any critical thinking, long term exploration or better yet delayed satisfaction responses. These technological tools are keeping you hooked by essentially shooting you full with dopamine everytime you read an article. And why ? all in the name of keeping your eyes on the screen so that pesky advertisement can pop-in ! You no longer can wait to complete a full lentgth editorial article, you would want a condensed InShorts snippet, and that's no good. For all great invention happens when the mind is allowed to sit still and wander and observe, according to numerous noted inventors including Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla (Funny both are in the same sentence) and yes even the late Steve Jobs.

The internet is no longer a machine of interchange and exchange of ideas, the internet, atleast on the consumer side of things is a giant attention hogging machine and it is throwing everything in the "Attention Hacking" workbook include Slot Machine strategies (The pull down and refresh interface in Instagram is by design ! It gives you a sense of seeing something new, much like a slot machine does and keeps you hooked on Dopamine)

Here's a small test for the readers, go to your phone's setting and in the usage section, see how much time you are spending on each app ! The results may shock you !

In part 2 we will discuss how some of these are actually changing reproductive patterns and bringing back diseases that were once considered eradicated by the medical community.

Stay tuned for more #TechPhilolosophy !