Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye by Michael R. LeGault

Author:Michael R. LeGault
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Threshold Editions
Published: 2006-07-31T14:00:00+00:00

* * *

The information explosion is not leading to better critical and creative thinking; it is largely being used to spout off, preach, or confirm existing biases and flawed thinking.

* * *

Perhaps this is the best point to lob in Einstein’s aphorism, “Information is not knowledge.” The point to extrapolate from Shenk’s analysis is that the information explosion is not leading to better critical and creative thinking; it is largely being used to spout off, preach, or confirm existing biases and flawed thinking. As Washington Post writer Norman Chad observes, “The Internet is the Wild, Wild West on a mouse pad. In chat rooms around the clock, you can say anything you want about anybody you like, without accountability.” The Internet, and information it contains, is growing into the electronic linchpin of an emotional, intuitive, debate- and dialogue-free society.

A third way information overload adversely affects critical thinking is by acting to create shorter and shorter attention spans and to short-circuit thinking before it can get started. Maybe the problem is not information overload, it’s information euphoria. And who, other than a Luddite (which this thinker is definitely not), cannot love the Internet, an American invention that has changed the world? What else can give you so much—an update on the ballgame, weather, hotel or flight reservations, a means for instant communication with family and friends, or the means to rescue your relationship with an order of flowers—and ask so little. The magic of the Internet is captured by J. C. Herz in her book Surfing on the Internet:

When I look up, it’s four-thirty in the morning. “No Way.” I look from the clock to my watch. Way. I’ve been in front of this screen for six hours, and it seems like no time at all. I’m not even remotely tired…. In fact, I’m euphoric…. I start thinking about this thing that buzzes around the entire world, through the phone lines, all day and night. It’s right under our noses and it’s invisible. It’s like Narnia, or Magritte, or Star Trek, an entire goddamned world. Except it doesn’t physically exist. It’s just the collective consciousness of however many people are on it.

Yet this worldwide consciousness places new demands on us that even the most ardent Internet-phile can find grating. Through the ever-mounting variety and amount of information, “The world attacks us with a constant assault of stimulation and distraction, assigns us more tasks than a regiment of wizards could ever finish, and forces us to multitask,” says Melinda Davis in The New Culture of Desire. Small wonder, notes Davis, that Wired magazine has crowned ADD the “official brain syndrome of the Information Age.” Technology has altered people’s very perception of time, as James Gleick documents in Faster. What was once fast is now slow, and what was or is slow (such as rational or creative thought processes) is now virtually intolerable. Gleick shows how even the preferred length of a sound bite for presidential candidates has shrunk from forty seconds in 1968 to less than ten seconds in 1988.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.