I watched the documentary “Surveillance Capitalism: The Social Dilemma” a few days ago, and combined with the book I read before, “Sorry, I Manipulated Your Brain”, it all tells the story of how to use the Internet to accurately influence specific groups of people at a very low cost.
My experience is that the Internet, as a new technology, has put forward higher requirements for its users: humans after years of rapid development.
This requirement is not a requirement for use and operation, but a requirement for cognition.
Nowadays, Internet products are becoming easier and easier to use, and more and more people are able to access the Internet and enjoy the convenience of the Internet. At the same time, a large amount of information is directly impacting people’s unprepared brains and minds.
People are becoming increasingly difficult to deal with their own emotions, especially boredom, and they are also becoming increasingly difficult to empathize with the people around them.
Because the content on the Internet does not have a rating system like movies, and simple age-based rating is actually not enough to distinguish the nature of the content.
Therefore, we need to improve our self-cognitive ability to deal with a large amount of media information.
My personal experience is to deal with it in two parts: knowledge and experience.
About knowledge
Since most of the content on the Internet is short information (compared to books, even long videos are short information), books on a certain field may be biased, and it is not normal that very short information is not biased, especially those with strong opinions content.
Therefore, we must clearly recognize that the information we obtain on the Internet is like a blind man touching an elephant.
Don’t treat the short messages you get online as an elephant, don’t treat the short messages you get online as an elephant, don’t treat the short messages you get online as an elephant.
Important things to say three times.
If a certain field has a significant impact on our life and work, we still need to read and study deeply to draw our own conclusions. Online short messages can only be used as a primer.
About experience
Relative to knowledge, the impact of Internet media on our life experience is actually the greatest, because swiping our phones takes up a lot of our free time, and even greatly affects our three views.
But fortunately, all this only happens at the brain level. Although the brain will also affect other parts of the body, we only need to learn how to use our brain correctly, and the impact can be easily reduced to an almost harmless level.
The method I use is meditation.
Through meditation, I can clearly see how various remarks affect the brain’s thinking.
And when I can clearly see these, these thoughts are controlled by me, not by me being controlled by thoughts.
Summary
The more efficient the Internet is, the higher the cognitive requirements for users. We need to continuously improve our cognitive ability to cope with and use the Internet.
Links
- Surveillance Capitalism: The Social Dilemma (Douban): https://movie.douban.com/subject/34960008/
- Sorry, I Manipulated Your Brain (Douban): https://book.douban.com/subject/35264809/