

Distraction, seeking and thinking on the internet - RyanMcGreal
http://www.raisethehammer.org/blog/1486/distraction_seeking_and_thinking_on_the_internet

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DanielBMarkham
_I don't accept either the heavy-handed liberalism that says progress is
inevitable or the reflexive conservatism that says we're losing something
precious by casting off tradition-for-tradition's-sake. However, I do believe
the following:_

Sigh. As long as you view this conversation in some kind of cookie-cutter,
political-box mentality I doubt you are going to make much progress.

Think of it like this: We now have immediate multi-sensory input into people's
brains in a way that the species has never had before. The big evolutionary
question is: what are we going to do with it? Are we going to join together
into some kind of hive mind? Are we going to become permanent couch potatoes?
Is each person going to have some super-cognitive ability they never had
before?

Look for drivers and patterns, not ideology.

The driver I see dominating right now is the push to control brain-time. Every
business that is half-way technology-related is striving to get some time on
your brain. They'll do that with Farmville, they'll do that with wikipedia,
they'll do that with YouTube, and they'll do that with Google.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the optimization is not around survival of
the fittest -- at least from the individual's standpoint. At least so far,
some new piece of trivia you picked up last night on the net is extremely
unlikely to allow you to pass along your genes and/or prevent another human
from doing so. But looked at from the _application's_ and startup's
standpoint, there is an intense evolutionary process going on where apps that
take up more brain time get funded (and have spin-offs, er, children) whereas
apps that don't find that brain time do not. Eyeballs always win out. This is
why your argument of better information quicker fails -- the information is
not a selection criteria. It's just information.

The interesting question is whether or not this evolutionary process of
applications being easier and easier to find and harder and harder to put down
ends up having some effect on reproduction. What the Atlantic and other
articles talk about is the immediate effects -- much more interesting are the
multi-generational ones.

I'd much rather talk about patterns of behavior in a system than the
motivations of those criticizing (or praising) it.

