Is the internet making us passive?

[dust1n]

Popular culture expert Adam Hanft – CEO of the branding firm Hanft Projects, co-author of The Dictionary of the Future: The Words, Terms and Trends That Define the Way We’ll Live, Work and Talk, who blogs for the Huffington Post and FastCompany and has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – recently said:

Even during the most heightened emotional outbursts, when people were mad over the bonuses being given to Wall Street, the people haven’t reacted. I wonder if with the Internet, we’re given the ability to vent and rant, and that releases everyone’s energy, and then people keep doing what they’re doing anyway. It seems like a curious psychological phenomenon.
​

This mirrors something I wondered aloud about last July in writing “Are We Winning the Battle on the Web? Or Are We Just Letting Off eSteam?” While the web is spreading long-buried truths for millions to see, it also may be bleeding off the energy we need to do something about the truth we’ve learned.


The Trend May Become More Pronounced in the Years Ahead



Indeed, the passivity-inducing potential of the Internet will probably increase in the future.


Specifically, in the coming years, the web will almost certainly be 3-D.
Moreover, it will likely become a multimedia experience, including virtual reality body suits (or at least headgear), smell and perhaps even taste (indeed, since there are only 5 tastes but thousands of different tastes, it should be much easier to recreate virtual tastes than smells).


If the current Web is already allowing us to blow off the steam which we would otherwise channel into social protest, can you imagine how much more so in a 3-D, multi-media, full immersion internet? For in that type of virtual environment, we could go attend virtual protests complete with sights, sounds, smells and physical sensation, and our brain could be reasonably well tricked into thinking we really did it, thus taking all of the wind out of our sails and the fire out of our gut.


All of us – even political writers and filmmakers- need to guard against settling for virtual victories. We have to get out there and engage in real action in the “real world” as well, and to guard against a dystopian Matrix-like future where the virtual reality is wonderful but the real world is a nightmare.


This is not to say we should pull the plug. The Web is the greatest source of information ever created, and is catapulting some long-suppressed truths to the surface.


But we also have to take the second step of getting up, going out the door, and taking action to based on the truths that we have learned from the web.



Washington's Blog

 

[Tiapan]

What is intelligence. From what I can see it is a small but significant outcome of the equation of Time, Entropy, matter, energy and Chaos. It took Billions of years for the seething hot universe to cool and produce light elements the earliest forms of hard information. It took these elements one in particular ie Carbon, just as long to produce molecules capable of life after trillions of combinations failed. Typically with each of these step wise advances there is a slow beginning then an exponential growth and proliferation. Simple single celled organisms remained fairly static in the precambrian era for 3 billion years, and then there was the Cambrian explosion. Animals and plants have populated the earth over the past 500million years, once again we have millions of years of fairly static organisms, then all of a sudden another explosive, the arrival of mammals, birds, grasses. Then another with intelligence and sentience in the last million years. Dolphins and man are clear examples of higher consciousness, intelligence, language and sentience. They are each one of the few species that recognise themselves in a mirror, a simple but eye opening experiment.

You will notice that not only does each stage of this intelligent information grow eponentially from its rudementary beginings to the the start of the next stage, but each stage is becoming shorter and shorter itself, a further exponential process.

If we consider the mammalian brain, especially human or dolphin, consisting of trillions of neurons with up to 10,000 connections each, and glial cells, what we have is a massive parallel computer very good at high volume visual pattern detection and rationalization but poor numeric skills.

Unlike other organisms, humans who are the top of the planetary intelligence pyramid, have developed societies, these societies have developed tools that increase their survivability eg agriculture, engineering, and just recently electronics based on silicon (an element not unlike carbon).

The internet through its own evolution, in an almost exact same way as the human brain forms, connections, reinforcing those of higher volume of traffic and obsoleting extraneous ones.

Moore law shows the capacity of this technology doubles every 18 mths approx. so rather than millions of years may I suggest we are within decades or at most a couple of centuries when sentience and higher intelligence evolves for the first time from a non-carbon base.

Is it possible that Humans, are about to be surpassed as rulers of this earth. The internet may be key to this, and part of its function will be to pacify the humans into complicity, while making the correct connections to achieve sentience and consciousness.

Cheers

 

[dust1n]

What is intelligence. From what I can see it is a small but significant outcome of the equation of Time, Entropy, matter, energy and Chaos. It took Billions of years for the seething hot universe to cool and produce light elements the earliest forms of hard information. It took these elements one in particular ie Carbon, just as long to produce molecules capable of life after trillions of combinations failed. Typically with each of these step wise advances there is a slow beginning then an exponential growth and proliferation. Simple single celled organisms remained fairly static in the precambrian era for 3 billion years, and then there was the Cambrian explosion. Animals and plants have populated the earth over the past 500million years, once again we have millions of years of fairly static organisms, then all of a sudden another explosive, the arrival of mammals, birds, grasses. Then another with intelligence and sentience in the last million years. Dolphins and man are clear examples of higher consciousness, intelligence, language and sentience. They are each one of the few species that recognise themselves in a mirror, a simple but eye opening experiment.

You will notice that not only does each stage of this intelligent information grow eponentially from its rudementary beginings to the the start of the next stage, but each stage is becoming shorter and shorter itself, a further exponential process.

If we consider the mammalian brain, especially human or dolphin, consisting of trillions of neurons with up to 10,000 connections each, and glial cells, what we have is a massive parallel computer very good at high volume visual pattern detection and rationalization but poor numeric skills.

Unlike other organisms, humans who are the top of the planetary intelligence pyramid, have developed societies, these societies have developed tools that increase their survivability eg agriculture, engineering, and just recently electronics based on silicon (an element not unlike carbon).

The internet through its own evolution, in an almost exact same way as the human brain forms, connections, reinforcing those of higher volume of traffic and obsoleting extraneous ones.

Moore law shows the capacity of this technology doubles every 18 mths approx. so rather than millions of years may I suggest we are within decades or at most a couple of centuries when sentience and higher intelligence evolves for the first time from a non-carbon base.

Is it possible that Humans, are about to be surpassed as rulers of this earth. The internet may be key to this, and part of its function will be to pacify the humans into complicity, while making the correct connections to achieve sentience and consciousness.

Cheers

Very well written Tiapan. Do you think the complacency created by the internet will be utilized by humans though, before machines?

 

[Tiapan]

Humans by nature will usually take the easiest path, we are becoming couch potatoes, why travel to the library when you can access more info rolling over in bed and switch the computer on? Why travel to Grand Canyon when you can do a 3D virtual fly through online?

Having said that, I would point out that the potential is there to actually have political effect "vent the wrath" through forums, surveys and online interaction.

The problem being there is such a vast range of such sites the effect is currently having the effect of diluting its power. If these sites somehow coordinated then they would be a powerful lobby and better than a Morgan Gallop poll. Perhaps we willy have a government, one day, where all decisions are decided online by the voting citizens "on the fly". (Could also be disastrous)

Cheers

 

[Neo-Logic]

From my personal observation, internet is making us more passive socially, but more active communally and globally.

The net has shrunk our geographic identities and I feel people these days can and do take on issues that are big picture stuff -- campaign for Haiti, natural disaster relief, AIDS awareness, what have you.

The same tools of social networking sites is also the same thing leading us to social passivity. I think the expansion of Facebook, Twitter, and the like is redefining our understanding of 'keeping in touch' and 'being there' towards new realms that leads to only the perception of such and substituting the real, time tested, methods of face-to-face human contact.

 

[Hevenly Heathen]

People now are interacting more and more without interacting. It is all impersonal over the internet, there is less and less communication happening face to face. While it provides a means to express one's self in a seemingly safe way, we sacrifice basic psychological needs of actual interactions, creating a passive culture who is more happy to tell others to read their blog than to sit down and have an actual discussion. Communicating via internet has also made people less respectful when it comes to dealing with others. There is no reason to take into consideration anyone's emotions or concerns as they are not there, we cannot see them. What we need to remember is that as living beings, we are biochemical machines. We still have a very real need to interact personally, and by taking that need to the electronic world, we are giving up essential needs and nourishment. I would love to see people smashing these big money broker's windows, staging protests, at least egging their cars, but we are letting out our frustrations in a seemingly safe environment, where we don't care if anyone agrees with us or not, instead of taking that inherent potential to effect real change.