Brain Death by Technological Innovation

Today I came across this short article on reading versus listening on 3 Quarks Daily, which I usually peruse once a week on Sundays, and thought I'd comment on it. As I've said, I don't think that I was a natural reader when I was growing up, and, because no one encouraged me to read, I don't think that I became particularly proficient at it until I was in my thirties. I probably wasn't that great of a listener either, but I was always able to pay attention. My appreciation of reading developed very gradually, when I found out that you could learn new and interesting things that you might never know otherwise. The end result, I think, is this blog, which probably covers more topics in a small space than most blogs.

What made me think of this topic is that I know a highly intelligent person who was able to read by about the age of four and graduated from Cambridge. I had long noticed that she liked to multitask and, before I even met her, she became accustomed to listening to recorded books and rarely actually read physical books. In the more than twenty years that I knew her, I don't recall her ever reading a demanding book. She usually listened to light fiction. Although this is only one example, it came to represent for me how new technology may actually induce cognitive decline. According to the Dworak study, there was a cognitive decline in the U.S. from 2006 to 2018 in all areas except spatial reasoning. On a broad scale, since about 2004, I have noticed a general decline in American intellectual life, a general increase in the number of social influencers, a general decline in news quality, and, especially now, an increase in the number of completely incompetent political operatives. Arguably, a major source of these changes has been social media, which has also created some of the wealth imbalances that we are currently experiencing.

As a personal matter, as I've written, I have found that by weaning myself from a daily consumption of internet material and switching to serious nonfiction and fiction in printed form, my psychological state has improved considerable since 2015. I've taken down that noose. An unfortunate side effect of this improvement is that many people are unable to relate to me, because they are still in that internet trance. For example, thousands of people from all over the world (currently about 20,000 per month) click onto this blog and never express their opinion.

Of course, I see this as a subtopic of the broader subject of the corrosive effects of capitalism. Essentially, the U.S. is up for sale. Maybe, in a few years, we'll luck out, and Xi Jinping will buy the U.S. and fire Donald Trump!