Excerpts from Future Files: How the Digital Age Is Changing Our Minds, Why This Matters and What We Can Do About It, by Richard Watson (via Andrew):
In A Mind of Its Own, Cordelia Fine makes the point that the brain's default setting is to believe, largely because the brain is lazy and this is the easier, or more economical, position. However, when the brain is especially busy, it takes this to extremes and starts to believe things that it would ordinarily question or distrust. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this but in case you are especially busy--or on Twitter--let me spell it out.
Our decision-making abilities are at risk because we are too busy to consider alternatives properly or because our brains trip us up by fast-tracking new information. We become unable to exclude what is irrelevant and retain an objective view on our experience, and we start to suffer from what Fredric Jameson, a U.S. cultural and political theorist, calls "culturally induced schizophrenia."
If we are very busy there is every chance that our brain will not listen to reason and we will end up supporting things that are dangerous or ideas that seek to do us, or others, harm. Fakery, insincerity, and big fat lies all prosper in a world that is too busy or distracted. Put bluntly, if we are all too busy and self-absorbed to notice or challenge things, then evil will win by default. Or, as Milan Kundera put it: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Crikey. That sounds to me like quite a good reason to unsubscribe from a few email newsletters and turn the cell phone off once in a while--to become what Hal Crowther terms "blessedly disconnected." The future of the planet and life as we know it are clearly at stake."
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