Video from ideacity
Nicholas Carr - What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
"Announcing at the beginning that his main goal of this talk is for you to go out and smash your smartphone, Nicholas Carr tells the audience exactly how the internet is affecting our memory and why this may not be a positive thing. Nicholas Carr writes about technology and culture. He is the author of the acclaimed new book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, which examines the personal and social consequences of our ever-growing dependency on computers. His previous book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Nick has written for The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Wired, Nature, and other periodicals. His essays, including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” have been collected in several anthologies, including The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Spiritual Writing. He writes the popular blog Rough Type." from the video introduction.
America has been dumbing down since the sixties and seventies.
Many of the youth I know in our area cannot add or subtract, do not read or care to read, are not social, and do not care to be involved in their community or help the people in it.
Their lives revolve around social media. They have become dysfunctional.
China unlike America realizes that their youth are addicted to the internet and it is making them unintelligent (dumber) and less fruitful. Now I am uninterested in politics and why exactly the Chinese government are doing this. The reality is they see the problem is huge and will eventually destroy their nation as it has helped destroy America.
Toxic individualism in which personal choice rises above all else is proving deadly to society.
Our youth have been allowed to choose sloth and foolish thinking over hard work and wisdom.
High tech aka social media has been allowed too much control and influence.
We as a culture as a people must say that these companies' profits do not take precedence over our youth and our families. Our young people must be taught to be morally responsible and involved in society or our culture will surely die and MAGA will not save us.
"When our basic identity (our life’s “confidence”) is rooted in ourselves, our hearts are essentially unstable and insecure. We’ll do anything to fortify our self-image, including tearing down the public image of—and the image of God in—others. That’s why the self-righteous heart is always condemning. It’s never satisfied with being “right”; it also always needs to prove that others are wrong..." Duke Kwon, Heart of the Matter
Fear is not a Christian virtue nor is our rage and anger. American Christians have joined the politics of self-righteousness and in the process, we are neglecting our families and our youth. The American educational system is a disgrace. Will we wake up and take care of what needs our attention or will we continue to waste away within our 'rabbit holes" of magical thinking and sin?
"China has ordered its online gaming companies to further reduce the services they provide to young gamers, in a move intended to curb what the authorities described as “youth video game addiction”.
Under the new rule, young gamers are only allowed to spend an hour playing online games on Fridays, weekends, and holidays, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
The rules, published by the National Press and Publication Administration, said users under the age of 18 would be able to play games only from 8 pm to 9 pm local time on those days.
Online gaming companies would be barred from providing gaming services to minors in any form outside those hours and would need to ensure they had put real name verification systems in place, said the regulator, which oversees the country’s video games market..." from the article: China cuts amount of time minors can spend playing online video games
"I hate to admit it. But reading this column will make you stupider. No, it’s not that what I have to say is particularly obtuse. It’s that you’re reading this piece online, where you are presented with a dizzying amount of options: click here, watch this, share that. These may seem like trivial decisions, but as the amount of online content explodes, our brains have consequently learned how to read differently (with constant distractions), which has reshaped how we learn. While the Internet gives us access to more information than before, paradoxically, we are becoming dimmer and more superficial as a people.
In the book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Nicholas Carr makes the case that technology is inducing an intellectual decay in our brains. It’s a provocative and even counterintuitive claim but one that he backs up with ample findings from neuroscience." from the article: The Internet Makes Us Stupid and Here’s Why