Project Vision 21

I like to write. It is one of my passions. The other one is reading good books. They go together. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to express serious thoughts in 140 characters in Twitter or 420 characters in Facebook. Finding anything written in readable English at any social site is more difficult than finding water in the middle of the desert.

I have said previously that the digital age is affecting our brains and therefore our ability to think. The few words we share in our micro-blogging are not the result of careful thinking. They are fragmented and unconnected thoughts,

Thanks to social networks and thanks to countless new devices we are now constantly connected. But constantly connected to what? I’m not asking “to whom,” but “to what.” Nicholas Carr offers a good answer in his book The Shallows: we are constantly connected to shallowness.

Such is the influence of this shallowness that people are more concerned about their ranking at search engines than about their relationship with other people. And many people are happier with a large number of “friends” in their social network than with a few flesh and blood friends who are going to remain friends regardless of the circumstances.

The shallowness of the digital age reveals we are mainly connected not to thoughts or ideas, but to unsatisfied desires and unresolved traumas. Those desires and traumas hide behind and are at the same time paradoxically revealed by our status updates, profiles, and avatars.

We are not thinking. Thinking, in its most basic definition, means to analyze a situation or idea to put it in the context of our own experience, that is, to develop an understanding the roots, the impact, and the consequences of that situation and idea, and its connections with other situations and ideas.

Because we don’t think, the only thing left is to satisfy our desires and find relief for our traumas. And we want to the easiest way to do it. That’s why instead of reading books we spend hours watching television or some other screen.

Carr – author of the famous column “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” – rightly says the digital age is robbing us from the intimacy once existed between the writer and the reader of a book, because of the hypnotic effect of Internet and all its distractions.

When you read and when you think (that is, when you internalize ideas or concepts), your mind must focus on whatever you are reading or thinking. However, Carr says, that intimate dialogue disappears in Internet because of its constant interruptions.

Those distractions are now omnipresent in all media. You are watching a television series “just to get some distraction” and suddenly, in the corner of the screen, there is a message about another series. A distraction inside a distraction. The “no thinking” squared.

How then are we ever going to solve the big challenges of our time: economy, wars, immigration, employment, ecology? That’s a question I prefer not to think about.