deepstash
Beta
What Would a World Without Internet Look Like?
A world without the Internet
- Antisocial behaviour existed well before the Internet. The same argument was used about the telephone - that it would reduce social encounters. But it really facilitated more of them.
- An attempt to separate the Internet from everyday life is useless. The only credible post-Internet visions are tied to civilizational collapses, such as the zombie apocalypse, global pandemics, or nuclear catastrophes.
- If the only way to imagine a world without an Internet is to think of a world without civilization, then the Internet has become our civilization.
7 SAVES
40 READS
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
6
Key Ideas
We don't know what we like
We often don't like what we say we like. We come to enjoy things we thought we hated and we are poor at predicting what we will possibly like.
We can't arti...
Choice and preference
Any action that entails a choice also entails a preference, for example, what to read, what to wear. We try to find work we like, entertainment we like, people we like.
Behind every preference is a combination of inputs including reasons, hunches, bodily needs, past experiences, unconscious desires, social pressures, and price point.
Taste today is a big business
- Online marketing strategies have become very sophisticated. The Internet uses a huge amount of data collected from clicks to produce a taste fingerprint for every consumer that uses a Web site or app.
- Customer reviewing is lay expertise and not trustworthy. We often find ourselves identifying with one-star hotheads. We want to know if things go wrong, how bad it will be. High number ratings may reflect "positivity bias."
4
Key Ideas
The Lost Art Of Reading
In the digital age, where reading material is abundant, sustained and deep reading is falling out of favor. Readers have lost the 'cognitive patience' that they had reading complex works i...
Reading In The Digital Age
New readers, especially children have reduced deep-reading skills.
Digital media is consumed differently in a 'skimming' time-bound way, as opposed to the profound, thoughtful reading associated with print books.
People have become addicted to digital devices, as the content they see and read may not be deep and immersive, but is engaging and conversation like, rendering it more alive than the printed word.
Rewiring The Brain
The Internet is training our brain to adapt and work differently than in the last century, as the changing technological landscape requires different cognitive skills.
The new digital mediums mostly do not have the quality, as most of the stuff online seems uninteresting, but it has the quantity, making it even more discordant and chaotic.
7
Key Ideas
Human nature is more than biology
The level of happiness is part of our genetic makeup - we have a set level and cannot rise above or fall below it.
Some scientists envision the day that we can manipulate our happiness ge...
Quantifying happiness
Happiness has always been difficult to quantify because it is subjective, depending on if you have a short- or a long-term outlook on life. Recently, researchers have started to distinguish between two types of happiness:
- Hedonic happiness that provides a mental high;
- Eudaimonic happiness, a sense of well-being which involves a life well-lived.
The staples of happiness
People will always be happy when they see their children prosper when they feel loved, secure, and well-fed.
But, this formula for happiness is so obvious that most people dismiss it. They would rather look for a secret ingredient. The answer is that there is no secret.