Intellectual obesity

This entry are just my thoughts on this article: The Intellectual Obesity Crisis. Read it first, it is worth your time (probably).

The gist of the article: the same way that we binge high-calorie foods, and it becomes a problem because we do not have a use for that extra energy input, we are binging on junk info that we have no use for. We consume passively, produce nothing, and after investing so much time, change nothing in the worl nor in ourselves.

We spend our time online. The amount of information here is… impressively frightening. We create and consume a huge amount of info, with the potential to teach us so much. But the way Internet works has made it a really assymetrical process: most people do not really create anything, and are passive consumers. The reach of a message online is so huge, that we have something like economic inequality, but for information. That’s what the virality of media posts means: in a economy of finite attention, for a fail compilation video to have million of views, another video must have almost zero.

I would like to say that it used to be different, but I’m not sure. And I’m probably just romantizicing what Internet used to be. But really, even if it was at website level instead of social media post level, there where still big fish and little fish, and the difference was not really in the quality of the words.

Still, when I went to the public library to get my half an hour of Internet browsing, and then my countless hours of random book browsing, I used to have more time to create myself. Without an incentive to post on some social media account, I felt free to dream large. I started writing what I thought could become a timeless manifesto, and I posted on a small blog that I recently rediscovered (and would never ever link here. So cringe). I would go offline to try to learn to draw myself (never got it quite right).

I don’t know, I at least had time between datum and datum to build data on my brain, and maybe think about applying it.

I think that’s mostly it. I’m writing this, right now. I don’t know if I’m adding too much to the original article, but at the very least I’m taking my time to process it a little bit better. Instead of going to youtube to watch the last Daily Dose of Internet video, at least I have chosen to be a bit bored and start typing some words.

And yes, if I fly close, if I only go around what the article said (like a comment on a blogpost), I’ll probably just reinforce it. It would be better to connect to something else, to reach out to what I have learned in my life. But I think this is, at least, nice. Nicer than reading it, thinking that it was amazing, and not waying anything else.

I have realized that I need some exercise. Burn some data and get moving. And I hope you’ll do the same!

Image source: OpenBike, an open source plywood bicycle.