i want you to start looking for something and i promise you once you start looking for it you'll never be able to stop
seeing it everywhere you go when's the last time you've walked into a restaurant and saw an entire table of friends on their phone or a group of people on the street or maybe even your family in the morning each content to be in their own world nearly unaware of the reality around them if the majority of human interaction is non-verbal what would happen if you removed everything but that small remainder for over a decade as it turns out that's the very experiment that we'r living in today
i remember when i was growing up way back in the day a prehistoric time before everyone had a cell phone and computers were named after the year they were made in okay i'm not quite a dinosaur yet but i grew up in a unique time where half of my childhood was without the major technology and platforms that seemed to rule parts of our lives today and the other half of my childhood was rapidly slingshotted into the new age of technology
i remember from the earlier half of my
childhood life seemed different
especially human interaction if you
wanted to talk with someone
you had no other option but to
physically go out and find them
and spend uninterrupted time with them
in the same room and while you were
there
there was nothing pulling your attention away nothing in the back of your mind reminding you that there are hundreds of other people sharing information that you might be missing out on that degree of presence practice day in and day out created a different richness to human interaction with intricacies and nuances that seems to be slowly and gradually lost
the further we progress into this newage of technological advancementand with the meteoric rise in popularityfor documentaries like the socialdilemmait's safe to say that this is a growingsentiment and realization within today'sculturethe terrifying crux to the problem isactually quite simplethere's a massive mismatch between therate of adaptationand advancement between our biology andtechnologybecause of the law of acceleratingreturns the pace of advancement ininformation technology is exponentialand while technology continues to growat a rapid pacewe're left still trying to figure outhow it actually impacts usespecially when we're teachingalgorithms to predictand modulate our behavior i don't thinkthat anyone's denying that social mediaas well as instant communication isextremely addictiveand its addiction falls right within thesame symptoms as substance abusebut what we don't quite know yet is howthis addiction over timechanges not only our behaviors throughhacking our positive reinforcementcenters of the brainbut how over time it changes ourperception of reality itselfwhen we first embarked upon the socialmedia experiment we had far morein-person interactionsunder our belt than we did interactionsonlineso we took our in-person frame ofreference and viewed all of ourtechnological interactions through thatlensbut now in a time when we have hundredseven thousands of friends acquaintancescelebritiesand online personalities that we keep upwith onlinewe have slowly over time replaced themajority of our interactions with beingdigitalhow much do we now view our in-personinteractionsthrough our new digital lens as aprominent exampleyou can look at our growingly polarizedpolitical discourse in modern timesand you see that we've already startedto see the symptoms of a very binaryinterpretation of human interactionit's also worrisome to think that ourupcoming generation's digital presencemay end up being more important thantheir in-person presenceso how do we stop all of this fromhappening is the answer to shut it alldownjust pull the plug on big tech i don'tthink that it isthe truth is we've opened pandora's boxand this is the reality that we're nowfaced withso what's the path forward the firststep is underwayawareness much of classical conditioningand if you don't know what that ispavlov's dogs might ring a bell is basedon the morenon-conscious mechanisms of the brain ifyou becomeconscious of how the conditioning isaffecting you it gives you a degree ofcontrol over your behaviorbeyond that it's important to maintainthat balance ofin-person and digital interaction you want the lens that you view theworld from to be a full 100 of human communication body languageemotion facial expression nuanced tonality
it's what we were designed to do and we can't let that practiceatrophy because that's what creates our sense of identity andcommunity that gives us a healthy view of others in the worldif we can maintain that balance we can begin to have ahealthier relationship with our online presence and retaincontrol over the influence these platforms and technologieshave on us
these algorithms are based on human behavior and responseand that's something we have control over take some small stepstoday maybe start by uninstalling some social media platformsrom your phone then you have to physically go log into yourcomputer to use it
removing some of the convenience if you're tied to your phonefor work once the day is done find some time to spend withyour family and friends and turn your phone completely off forit be fully present with the people thatyou're with and you just might notice that the world isn'tquite as crazy as it seems and that the life right in front ofyou is beautiful you
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