Goodbye book?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

I'm on the morning train. The carriage is full of people of different ages: those who are older, head to work, those who are younger - to study. It takes exactly an hour to drive from the outskirts of the city to the center, and therefore everyone finds something to do. Someone is asleep, someone just looks out the window and listens to music. But my focus is on others. Those who take books, phones and tablets out of their bags.

Here is the man opposite. He opens a thick, worn-out volume in its place and plunges into reading. And here is the student on the left. It turns on an impressive smartphone and a kaleidoscope of bright images, advertisements and demotivators starts flashing across the screen.

A man and a guy are equally absorbed in their activities: the first is reading a book, the second is the Internet "surfing" in a social network. But what's in their head? Diametrically opposite. The man reads a long, sequential text. He is captured by the world building up in his imagination, the plot unfolding in this world, images logically connected and inscribed in the world and the plot. I think everyone who has read the books will easily imagine this.

The guy, on the other hand, jumps on chaotic "blocks" dedicated to completely different topics: a small text plus an associative picture. Everyone who "jumped" on posts in the VK news feed can easily imagine this too. A chaotic "salad" of catchy images, memes, mocking comics, pseudo-philosophizing, and so on, and so on.

Another observation. University. We are waiting for the start of the pair in front of the office. Nobody will get a book: everyone again turns to their phones and continues to "jump" on the news feeds.

Another situation. A company of young people goes out for a walk. Evening, shop, beer, sunflower seeds and.., do you think a fun conversation? No, everyone flips their fingers across the screens. At best, what is extracted from the Web becomes the subject of conversation; at worst, everything happens in painful silence.

Are these situations familiar? I think many. What it is? Someone will say that this is nonsense, and there is nothing special here. Well, people are sitting on the Internet, so what? Maybe nothing, because I myself am sitting, although I don’t "jump" on VK all my free time. But I really know the Net's trash heap personally, not "through friends."

So, I want to share the observation of myself. I sit down to read a serious book that requires the use of the brain. And after 20 minutes of reading, I notice that I want to break away, go for tea, scratch myself, look out the window. The head gets tired, it's hard to keep attention. I remember how before, when I did not yet know the Internet, I could read all night long, and far from simple books. How I immersed myself in them without a trace. And I am horrified, realizing that something is changing me.

This is not nonsense at all. This is a different way of thinking. Surface, sliding. The brain simply unlearns to build large-scale and multidimensional images. It is necessary either to give completely ready-made ones - as in computer games - or not to overload the brain with what is "mnogobukof".

And now the most important thing. Modern school, literature lesson. Checking knowledge of Pushkin. Do you think you need to show an understanding of the complex images built by the writer? No, in the workbook the question: "How old was Grinev at the time of the beginning of the Pugachev uprising?" So much for the "Russian revolt, senseless and merciless."

Tests … What is their real, deep content? To pass the test, you have to experience the culture, or is it enough … is it just cold to remember? Do you understand what is behind this phrase? All Russian writers together roll over in their graves.

You feel? A fundamental principle is changing before our very eyes. People are no longer being shaped by the book, they are being formed by something chaotic and lifeless, into which our information environment has become today, and into which (by whom?) Our education is rapidly transforming. If nothing is changed, then the majority of people in the coming decades will change dramatically. It will be completely different.

But I started all this reasoning for the sake of one simple thought. This "new man" with a "sliding" mindset has one important property - he is very easy to manipulate. It is quite simple to construct the inner world of a person, if it is not a complex system, but a primitive set of "wishes". And then manipulation consists only in controlling information flows. A person who is hooked on a certain trend will do the rest by himself, he just needs not to interfere and sometimes help.

Now for the final touch. Have you heard that the elite educational institutions of the West for students as severely restricting access to the Internet? That makes children read very large and very complex texts. Children of the elite must be able to really think. After all, they themselves become the elite. They must be able to manage. Manage, naturally, that "fluid" public consciousness that I described above.

And what is it together? And these are realized dystopias. This is the formalization of the final division of humanity into the elite and okhlos, into masters and slaves (maybe sometimes very well-fed, but still slaves). Perhaps even the division is anthropological. By the way, are you sure that the elite who control the world's main resources still regard us as human beings? I'm not at all sure. Simple logic may lead us further, but that's enough for me.

Is there a way out of this? There is. It is both very simple and colossally complex. Think, who makes us sit for hours in front of our brain-thinning screens and monitors? No one. Who forbids us to read and comprehend world culture and thus truly shape ourselves? No one. Who tells you not to work with your own children, leaving everything at the mercy of the school? Again, nobody.

See what a thing. The essence of modern reformatting of the information environment is that everything happens as if by itself. And it is perceived by everyone as something natural, as an inevitable consequence of progress. There is no compulsion, there is no single center. There is a formative overarching environment. And this is the power of this reformatting. But this is also his weakness. Because no one forces us to give up real life, we are simply distracted from it … This means that no one will forbid us to return to her back, there would be real will for this.

Imagine for a moment that millions of people have stopped watching TV and spending hours on social media. That they began to learn themselves and teach their children (once, by the way, this was the norm …). That they began to understand what was happening around and convey this understanding to others. That they began to unite and change the life around them, first changing themselves. What's so incredible? Never mind. There are a lot of precedents for such grassroots movements in history. So the word is ours. Do we want to be informational unicellular? Do we want to see how our children grow up like that? I think everyone will agree that no. So you need to wake up yourself, wake others up, unite and "learn, learn, learn."

Victor Shilin

See also: Brain Degradation