Nic dziwnego że tak zwana Agenda jest zainteresowana cyfryzacją. Czym niewolnicy głupsi tym mniej kłopotów sprawiają właścicielom.

 

1. Cyfryzacja na pierwszym miejscu, to faktycznie mówi wszystko. Nie każde ulepszenie technologiczne jest złe:

   Socrates was right. As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory. What once had to be stored in the head could instead be stored on tablets and scrolls or between the covers of codices. People began, as the great orator had predicted, to call things to mind not “from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” The reliance on personal memory diminished further with the spread of the letterpress and the attendant expansion of publishing and literacy. Books and journals, at hand in libraries or on the shelves in private homes, became supplements to the brain’s biological storehouse. People didn’t have to memorize everything anymore. They could look it up.

   But that wasn’t the whole story. The proliferation of printed pages had another effect, which Socrates didn’t foresee but may well have welcomed. Books provided people with a far greater and more diverse supply of facts, opinions, ideas, and stories than had been available before, and both the method and the culture of deep reading encouraged the commitment of printed information to memory. In the seventh century, Isidore, the bishop of Seville, remarked how reading “the sayings” of thinkers in books “render[ed] their escape from memory less easy.”1 Because every person was free to chart his own course of reading, to define his own syllabus, individual memory became less of a socially determined construct and more the foundation of a distinctive perspective and personality. Inspired by the book, people began to see themselves as the authors of their own memories. Shakespeare has Hamlet call his memory “the book and volume of my brain.”

   In worrying that writing would enfeeble memory, Socrates was, as the Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco says, expressing “an eternal fear: the fear that a new technological achievement could abolish or destroy something that we consider precious, fruitful, something that represents for us a value in itself, and a deeply spiritual one.” The fear in this case turned out to be misplaced. Books provide a supplement to memory, but they also, as Eco puts it, “challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it.”

   Ale czytanie książek a czytanie zawartości internetu, to dwie różne rzeczy

   Sometime in 2007, a serpent of doubt slithered into my infoparadise. I began to notice that the Net was exerting a much stronger and broader influence over me than my old stand-alone PC ever had. It wasn’t just that I was spending so much time staring into a computer screen. It wasn’t just that so many of my habits and routines were changing as I became more accustomed to and dependent on the sites and services of the Net. The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing. It was then that I began worrying about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes. At first I’d figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected. Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, I sensed, was turning me into something like a high-speed data-processing machine, a human HAL.
   I missed my old brain.
   (…)
   WHAT DETERMINES WHAT we remember and what we forget? The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory. “For a memory to persist,” writes Kandel, “the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.”35 If we’re unable to attend to the information in our working memory, the information lasts only as long as the neurons that hold it maintain their electric charge—a few seconds at best. Then it’s gone, leaving little or no trace in the mind.
   *
   37The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

   The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains
   Nicholas Carr
   https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Carr?m=0

   Z innej dobrej książki o negatywnym wpływie „cyfryzacji”
   A vast body of publications praises the advantages and benefits of these new media. The object of this book is not to pile on yet more fruitless praise, but to invite the reader to reflect critically on the use of these new means of communication. For such an unusual approach will reveal how they have become ever more invasive, producing many negative effects of which their users are not fully aware, although they may notice them to some extent in their own lives, in their children, and in those close to them.* Although the modern drift of society, with its dark portents for the future, might make us wish for it to change, our aim, at this critical time, is pragmatic. It is to appreciate better the directions in which the new media are leading us and the real and possible pathologies that they may provoke, to learn to master them, and to limit their use where they have regrettable effects.

   The aim of this book is first to diagnose the pathologies that the media can produce and how they may develop in every sphere of society—political, economic, and cultural—and in all facets of personal life—bodily, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual. For they may cause great harm to the lives of men and can go so far as to change man’s nature itself for the worse.

   If we realize how gravely sick is our civilization, we may gain strength to resist. We can gradually reduce our use of the media and so lead to a decline of the industry that profits from them. And as we reduce our use of the new media, society will change, so that we can discover once more the authentically human and spiritual communion that we have lost.

   *V.C. Strasburger, Professor of Pediatrics at the University of New Mexico notes: “The media represent some of the most under recognized and most potent influences on normal child and adolescent development in modern society. Because media influences are subtle, cumulative, and occur over a long period of time, parents, pediatricians, and educators may not be aware of their impact” (“Children, Adolescents and the Media,” Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care 34, 2004: 54). M. Desmurget observes: “The causal link between the media and the symptoms they produce is often hidden by the time which elapses between exposure and the behavior it causes” (TV Lobotomie. La vérité sciéntifique sur les effets de la télévision, 2nd ed., Paris: J’ai Lu, 2013, 28).

   Jean-Claude Larchet
   The New Media Epidemic

   Nic dziwnego że tak zwana Agenda jest zainteresowana cyfryzacją. Czym niewolnicy głupsi tym mniej kłopotów sprawiają właścicielom.