The most ironic thing about social media is that people are reading a lot, and yet are becoming dumber day by day. I feel that about myself too. Enormous and ever increasing volumes of crap is generated every day and fed to us through a bunch of channels. We pick and pass crap, and keep doing that until the crap is thoroughly consumed by everyone. And then we move on to other crap, and keep doing that all the time on our mobile devices. Even if we try to take a break from all this madness, we get extremely restless with the feeling of getting left behind. We can't stay away for long and are internally pushed back towards it. It has deeply screwed our minds and our ability to control them. While the creators of crap do that to get more visits and somehow get more ad revenue or plain attention, the readers are going on reading and getting entertained. It's like a whole new medium of entertainment has emerged for all idle times and when on the go - all situations with no brain usage required and when reflexes are enough to manage the physical activity. If TV was once seen as killer of all productive time, mobile and data now are together the modern-day weapons of mass destruction. (Warren Buffett needs to revise his quote in the changing times, but this one's taken now!) And yet, TV has not been displaced. In fact TV has transformed to become a tool in this whole data game.
There are indeed positive aspects in all this. For example, without doubt, the awareness of people has reached a whole new and advanced level. Information travels fast and wide within no time. And when it matters, it's really useful and exciting to have everybody on the same page. But of late I've started seeing this feature getting abused abundantly. Things on social media have a repetitive nature, and the same detail or info or news gets reinforced in our minds as it keeps appearing in front of our eyes as we scroll screens. It has 2 effects. One - agents who want to spread something - a message, some news, or a perception - even totally false - are smartly manipulating people's minds to achieve targeted outcomes. Two - as most of the stuff is on topics of minor intellectual value, we feed ourselves continuously on shit that neither helps us nor adds to our knowledge of the world. Our brain probably dynamically allocates resources for new shit by freeing up some old shit which is sent to some long-term area of the brain that keeps piling up shit but offers very minimal ability to retrieve or recall. And this long-term shitty area is getting loaded with more and more shit - at the fastest pace ever in the history of human species. So much ever increasing load chokes the brain, slows us down and makes us dumb. All this technology was supposed to make us smart, but it's only turning us into idiot boxes which can't think. And that's the irony.
