Surely with a google calendar, internet news and radio a.s.o .

Changes in behavior affects much more the media industry than everyday life.

People want knowledge, but only knowledge that is interesting to them. Anything that can be outsourced will be, successfully, and for the betterment of us all.

Our pet theories and opinions will improve the world, one at a time. Or so I hope and believe.

Whoa, citation please. It could very well be that people remember about as much stuff as they did before, but now with that gadget in hand the stuff they shuttle into long term storage has changed. I used to have to remember a bunch of telephone numbers but now let my phone cache minutiae like that so I can devote my neurons to things that are more interesting and important to me. It’s not that I’m putting less stuff in my head, it’s just that I’m applying more fine grained filters to it. Ultimately I seem to just wind up stuffing all my now freed memory full of song lyrics, but eh.

But I do agree about people addicted to their devices. I hate hate hate leaving the office having a conversation with someone and they have to look at their phone to see if they’ve gotten any messages while we’re walking along and talking. Look, I get that I’m less interesting than lots of people out there in your monkeysphere, but could you at least not throw it in my face like that?

“when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts.”

To the extent that the Internet is a useful tool, I think you’ll see that those “selected” by Nature will find the proposition that “the internet is starving our attention” is a strangely antithetical perspective, whereas people being “selected” out will agree that the internet is a reduction in the limits of humanism.

The only way that you can see the dialectic nature in this situation is if you are within that group that doesn’t find the internet to be an unwieldy source of distraction. Prior to the internet we processed a lot of social information to the exclusion of others’ experiences. We read what we could, we talked to people when we could, but the variety of people we were able to co-process information with was much more limited than it is now. The pre-internet period was dark and information was processed more slowly. That’s how I see it. But there is a relativity. For other people the pre-internet was just right, they had their sources, and their means of processing, all source of information overload had been managed to a preferred level that fit a pre-internet context and now it is all undone and become too bright again, there is too much new information now. That’s relativity. Its the same thing from two perspectives, two contexts.

Historical note: The Major Fuller in question was a disciple of Crowley, important military historian, and one of the first people in the military to realize the breakthrough importance of tank warfare after WW I. The British military didn’t listen to him; the Germans did.

But too much information, without the energy to build something with it, to make those critical connections, to pass it on to those who can actively use it, can begin to ferment, can

It’s like eating too much food, more than your system can digest in a certain period of time.

Information has been shown to have a neurological effect: reading something we agree with gives us a little dopamine burst, while reading something that doesn’t square with what we hold true has the opposite effect. We like to feel like we are right, and so we naturally seek out information that confirms this.

Thus, people have a natural inclination to read more and more of what they agree with, and to ignore what they don’t. Agreeable information literally becomes like a drug. Pardoxically,collecting information becomes a form of mindless entertainment.

I think there’s a real value in the “information diet.” We should treat information the way we treat food. We are awash in valueless information, just as we are awash in nutritionless food. We should consume that which is nutritious, which makes healthy connections in our system, and that turns easily into energy that we can do something useful with. We should cut back on consuming that which only reaffirms what we already hold to be true.