About demons in the car and memes of destruction
Here, some argue that, I quote, “the growth in the number of tablets and the development of broadband wireless Internet will lead to the fact that the very perception of information will change: time will become too expensive a resource for which information will have to be fought by all available means. The format of short - from 10 to 30 seconds - video sketches will be widely used. The average time to watch a video will decrease. As a result, people completely stop memorizing anything. Why is this necessary when there is a handy tablet with voice control at your fingertips that will quickly find any information? The consequences are scary to imagine. ” Reading this kind of statement is weird.
Humanity had to "stop remembering" many thousands of years ago, with each century aggravating the likelihood of loss - well, of course, if Alexander’s fears have at least some soil. After all, a few thousand years ago, writing appeared. Writing down something valuable, the person obviously helped himself not to forget about it, which supposedly should have led to the loss of the ability to memorize.
Recording methods have been improved: from arbitrary symbolic marks with serifs on a stone to printing technology, extremely cheap pencil pens at the cost price and the same publicly available paper. For several centuries, if desired, people can carry with them a notebook and the writing materials necessary for its use. And in the twentieth century, all this could already fit in a breast pocket, which many did.
Without any, we will notice, computers, wishing wrote down everything that not to forget about it. People kept calendars not to miss the date, glued papers with reminders to themselves on the refrigerator or on the mirror. Some even made secretaries for themselves, one of whose duties was to remind the employer of upcoming affairs.
Why didn't all this lead to the loss of the ability to remember something? Why, instead, has the number of what the average person remembers not decreased, but increased?
Elementary.
First, there can be no such radical evolutionary changes in a pitiful several thousand years. Evolutionary account - hundreds of thousands and millions of years.
Secondly, the usefulness of memory has not gone away. It has even increased many times - since most people’s activities have shifted from performing the simplest mechanical actions towards multi-step work that requires analysis and planning. To use the recorded, you must be able to keep it in memory at least for a while - while you look at other recorded information. For analysis, it is necessary at least for a while to remember what has just been read, for, generally speaking, analysis always includes a set of facts and theses, and not just one. Man, therefore, is more often trained in memorization than a few thousand years ago. And led him to this state including the ability to store information somewhere else besides her own head.
Human memory has quite definite limits, both in terms of the number of things that can be simultaneously held in “RAM” and in terms of long-term capacity. However, qualitative leaps in technology rather quickly required the ability to go beyond these limits, and it was this opportunity that was realized through the invention of "writing" in the broad sense of the word - not as the ability to only write text, but in general the ability to store information using symbolic symbols including illustrations, diagrams, and so on.
Thanks to this remarkable invention (which, of course, was not “one-act”, but stretched in time and space), scattered facts could be recorded - not only in the coming days, but for many months, years, or even centuries. Not only for yourself, but also for those who will live after you, or who live at the same time as you, but very far away.
The generalization of the facts led to the possibility of “archiving memory”: now it was possible to memorize not individual results, each separately, but their generalization. Not "numbers", but "formula". Not specific ratios of specific quantities, but the regularity of the ratios of all quantities of a certain class.
That was where the horror was! Avon as - "memorize the formula." Is this what, “young people will now forget how to memorize” ?! Boys Boyes
Instead, the next generation began to memorize more and better. First, because of the change in the nature of the activity associated with technological progress caused by including the invention of writing, and secondly, because they actually began to train more often. The biological structure of the head remained the same, but it already had the ability to train. You do something all the time - you start to do it better and better. Information is usually written down in order to use it, and when it is read it is “loaded” from a sheet of paper into the operational memory of a person. More downloads - more training - better develop the corresponding ability.
Against the background of this huge leap - from memorizing private observations to recording patterns - the ability to write something into an electronic device actually turns out to be a minor amendment to the one already created. Yes, now, with the advent of computers, it has become much easier to store records and even among them it has become possible to find the required items much faster than even in the recent past. However, if the previous, much more ambitious step did not “kill the ability”, but instead led to its development, then why would the current step manifest itself in a strictly opposite way?
In the presence of writing, “a convenient tablet, which is always at hand” is almost the same as “a notebook, which is always at hand,” and the availability of the Internet is similar to having a library card of the Lenin Library. Faster? OK. It's good. But what's terrible? Only in that faster? Good only when slow? But why not remove the catalogs in the Lenin Library that allow you to quickly find the book you need? Surely only the need to manually sort through all the books, arranged in a random order, will keep humanity's ability to memorize!
Or is the fact that “the information is simplified to thirty-second clips”? Well, this is not a matter of the carrier, but of the information itself. What, the one who now spends all time for viewing of such rollers, earlier at this time would study the theoretical physics? Oh no, he would have watched football on TV, gladiator fights or how the river flows. If he didn’t have simple access to pop content, he would simply spit at the ceiling, if he wasn’t forced to do something.
In other words, the whole “boys” is sucked from the finger. More precisely, not from a finger, but from the fear of new technologies, quite characteristic of the average person.
A man is afraid of what he does not understand. And instead of understanding and starting to understand, he spends time on reflection about the fear of the already existing, but still incomprehensible to him. And sometimes - to broadcast this fear to others. This is the effect of the sensationalism of the quoted statement. “Dark technologies are coming. I see a future full of sorrows, troubles and gnashing of the tooth. " Why? But why not! I just see it. Technology! Boyus! Fuck knows what my Google-glasses shine in my eyes and what my robot vacuum cleaner thinks about. I do not understand what all this is based on, and therefore I suspect evil.
Technologies came into use, but the knowledge and knowledge that justified them remained the lot of a small group of specialists. Hence a lot of new fears among the broad masses - before radiation and other radiation, gene modifications, artificial intelligence, implants, autopilot and electronics.
Looking at the screen of his communicator, a person is aware that this thing is made by people. But he does not know how it works. He does not know how programs are written - even in principle. He does not know physics and chemistry. He can only read.
And he read somewhere that inside this thing there is a whole bunch of demons capable of sucking his brain, destroying his life and damaging all his loved ones. True, "demons" sometimes appear under some pseudoscientific name, but this only makes them even more demonic, because the "authority of science" is also mixed with the authority of spontaneous beliefs.
People believe that this thing, though done by people, but not from this world. Something terrible is hidden in it. If you read from it, the vision will deteriorate, which for some reason did not deteriorate when the same person read the same texts from paper pages. Why? That's how! “This thing shines with artificial light!”
A person does not ask himself what it is, “artificial light,” and whether he differs in some way from the light of “natural,” since he generally has little understanding of what light is. The screen of his communicator shines on him with the same photons, which otherwise would have flown to the retina of his eyes, being reflected from the sheet, but it seems that these photons seem to be “some other”. And because of this, spoil the sight. Not a small print, not tired eyes - which would have manifested itself when reading a paper book in exactly the same volume - but this one is “artificial”.
In fact, the difference between "natural" and "artificial" light really exists. The first - the light of the sun - has a much wider spectrum, but this seems to be creating less fear, not more. From the screen it is impossible, for example, to receive the lion’s dose of ultraviolet in one sitting and get burnt, and on the beach, from the sun, it is possible.
In addition, there are differences in polarization. However, a person is daily exposed to both polarized and unpolarized light, and the intensity of both is much higher than the intensity of light from the screen. If this could lead to problems, then here one should be afraid of natural light rather than artificial.
Another phone irradiates the brain and internal organs. Than? Do not ask. After all, he still does not know what “radiation” is. A light bulb irradiates it every day. Every day he walks through space filled with radio waves, infrared and ultraviolet radiation, as well as radiation, but for some reason he thinks that it is the radiation from the phone that will surely kill him. He did not measure the dose and did not read about such measurements, because he does not know what a “dose” is. But he "knows" about the danger, because it was written about her in the yellow rag, thrown last week into his mailbox.
I remember I flew on an airplane in which flight attendants forbade the use of mobile during the entire flight, and not just during takeoff and landing. Even for reading. Even with the included "aviation mode". Of course, the entire salon read from a variety of devices, watched a movie with them or played games. But the flight attendants tirelessly ran through the cabin for many hours of flight and demanded "turn it off all over."
By the way, the requirement to turn off electronic devices during takeoff and landing, and “aviation regime "in them, no more meaningful. The frequencies at which portable electronics work - whether Wi-Fi, bluetooth, mobile network are turned off or not - do not even closely intersect with the frequencies used by on-board electronics, and therefore they are not able to prevent it from working correctly.
This requirement arose in the days when telephones only appeared, and therefore the airline safety personnel responsible for flight safety did not yet know whether the telephones could interfere. Therefore, just in case, such a requirement was also included in the schedule.
The only sensible explanation that could be used: reading absorbs the attention of the passenger, and therefore he does not pay attention to what the crew is saying at the moment. However, reading paper books absorbs attention no worse, but for some reason they do not offer to stop reading them during takeoff and landing.
In addition, it is theoretically possible that if several dozens of passengers simultaneously begin to install mobile communications, a surge of electromagnetic radiation will have sufficient intensity to cause interference in the headphones of one of the crew members, despite the rather large space separating the crew and passengers. However, even a small probability of this is eliminated by a ban on telephone calls - but not on the use of electronics for other purposes.
They could not substantiate their claim, for the only thing they knew was that “the electronics prevent the control of the aircraft.” How? No need to think about it. It just hinders.
At the same time for turning off the device, they took off the screen on it. Apparently, the artificial light prevented the electronics in this plane. Despite the fact that anyone who wished could see that this “artificial light” completely stops even with a sheet of plastic of millimeter thickness, and therefore it can only be broken by a device that is important for controlling an airplane located in the passenger’s head and for some reason not covered by this destructive radiation.
The flight attendants did not understand that right at the same time the sun rays enter the aircraft cabin, whose radiation spectrum, generally speaking, is much wider, and the intensity is much higher. Yes, the flight technique breaks only from the included screen of the communicator.
From best intentions, illiterate flight attendants struggled with electronics, which included passengers, for their own sake, passengers, safety. But even good intentions with ignorance of the physics of processes are nothing more than a handful of stones, with which they pave the way to hell.
If illiteracy will prevail, we personally observe the ban not only on the use of electronic cigarettes in the cabin, but also on the use of all electronics in general. It will not make any sense, since it will be caused only by the total technological illiteracy of all the participants in the chain who make decisions.
And exactly the same demonic fear of electronics will lead to similar consequences in other areas. In case of an unfortunate scenario, we will still hear mothers demanding that their children stop using electronic notebooks in order “not to spoil their memory.” Exactly the same as many of them already require not to read from the screen in order to “not spoil the eyesight.”
Yes Yes. Just because somewhere another author shared his “fears” - the critical mass for introducing a meme into the minds of the broad masses is typed this way. Memes mostly do not come from scientific laboratories, but from the usual press. Be careful with words, their effect is stronger than other real physical effects.
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