I know that I am what could be called “The Voice of Doom” but I believe that society needs people like me. Following the traditions of SciFi and distopic writers I try to show the world how bad it could be, marketed in a coherent social image. Most of the time it doesn’t really help or at least not in the short run because society has such a huge inertia. Beside that, people who, in this time of happiness, still bother reading such dark scenarios… or simply bother reading, don’t really need to be told about it because they can probably make up for themselves the society I am writing about. For those, let’s just say that I am simply adding up all the markers and unify the big picture.
Yes, the brain becomes a more and more obsolete tool. What has began as a way to enhance our lives, to free more of our time for our pleasures and to allow us to pursue the happiness, has metamorphosed into a race for removing the daily functions of our brain.
Now, let us sustain this. We use GPSes to navigate our way not only in unfamiliar surroundings but in environments that should be/become familiar, like our own cities, large or small. I met quite a few people who, after living more than 5 years in a place, still can’t name the major streets and boulevards or even highways of their town/city. At the store, the machines add, and subtract and even the change to be given/received is computed from the bills handed. In general we don’t do this and is difficult to explain to children why they should memorize the multiplication table, as long as we don’t. We don’t read and instead watch TV because images speak more than 1000 words, are easily digested. Even so, it seems that with the increase of technical quality of our TVs, the intellectual content of the programming and of movies has decreased. We have PDAs and organizers and “intelligent” cellphones that can remember the telephone numbers so that all we need to remember is “John” or “Mary”. Even guessing time instinct is quite lost since we have so many sources of finding out time. A search engine can retrieve information in a matter of seconds and children know this better than anyone, since many teachers advise them to use Google for their homework. Not so many years ago, that very same information would have taken weeks of research, a number of books read and so on – now it’s received instantaneously in a pre-digested form and students never manage to grasp the idea that education requires effort. Started as a current against the dumb memorization process of the past, the educational process now moved into the other extreme, of considering memorization a totally futile tool, even when it comes to multiplication table or the national anthem.
This advantage, of having information at our disposal, lead many people to consider that there is no necessity to store it in our brain. Just like we don’t store water in wells because we have running water, we ended up by not remembering personalities names, dates, pretty much anything that is worth remembering. As a normal consequence of this excessive “offer” process, the value of the information has decreased and the “demand” has decreased. If you can find anything, anytime, anywhere, what is the point of storing it and – mostly – processing it?
Going back to another post – many people are against using the word “STUPID”. What they fail to perceive is that using less and less our minds, we DO become STUPID, individual after individual, and – eventually – as a society! Just by not talking about it is simply pushing the problem under the rug.