This was my first emotional reaction after reading this article in Time. Human beings are bipedal social twittering pigs. Such definition in reminiscence of Plato's critics would be also appropriate. But as pigs doesn't fly , so humans will not fly either.
In all other aspects i don't envy birds.
More on the serious note, i doubt what the author names as a perceived advantages of such twittering shift.
As we move to smaller and smaller bites of news, we are also becoming smarter news consumers, able to consume more information in a shorter amount of time than ever before.
More smaller bits doesn't automatically imply smarter. There is a limit to atomization, which if exceeded rather causes dumbness. Secondly, we shouldn't strive to consume more "bits of information", it is a piggish behaviour. Thirdly, emotional blurb can hardly be filtered away from those diminishing bits of information. Overall, it is more noise and less rational thought. May be , as a whole species, we do becoming smarter as a result of sharing all those semi factual semi emotional bits of information through the network, but not as an individual being. For one man it is almost impossible to stay in his mind eating this salad, he will likely vomit, and what will be left is less understanding than he had before. Even relying only on google or similar services will not make the job.
Binary machines can be trained be a bit smarter, perhaps with the aid of neural networks algorithms, to extract words, but not emotional context. Words itself are just shadows of our thoughts. I'm waiting for a drastic evolutionary steps towards newer, future interfaces with machines through devices, which will be able to read our "mental states".
There are some prototypes in the market, but i wasn't convinced yet that they really "read the mind". And then such twittering could became powerful weapon in the evil hands, brain shitting will beat the records of pigs. (black humor)
No comments:
Post a Comment