Wealth of Information, Poverty of Attention

Challenges of the Age of Information

Before AI and ChatGPT, we were already in an age where there is an overloading of information.

It's these black hat SEO hackers that ruin everything. They sell a very commoditised service, something that’s almost tactile. They would go around saying that they can get you to page one or to result number one for a price. The truth is, you can't promise such things. The only way to do it is if you game the system. This requires knowledge of how the algorithm works and manipulating it to serve your interests and goals.

Behind the scenes, all these black hat techniques like follow-unfollow, running scripts and bots for engagement, they still exist today. But the platforms have gotten better in putting a stop to all of this and punishing the accounts who do such practices.

As a result, we get a whole bunch of content that don’t just suck, but they don't come from human beings, they don't come from the heart.

Content Without Soul

You get a whole bunch of content, in all the formats you can think of, that lack soul.

We can look at data—see what's working in the market, and we just churn more of that. To the point where we began to neglect the ethos and the core of the message. Just need to keep supplying what the audience demands.

This snowballs and people get what they want, and they will want more of it.

But now, we can see the impact of that degradation of intellect as a whole in society.

Look at all the TikTok lives, what with the NPC (non playable character) trend and so on… look at the ridiculousness, because these are things that appeal to the basal instincts of the human being.

Does that mean you feed it?

Does that mean you just give them more of what you want?

Or perhaps one should think about the bigger purpose.

Why they exist, why they do what they do, and what is it their audience really needs to know to improve their lives.

The Shift to Entertainment and Escapism

Everything has been dumbed down to entertainment, to shock factor, to clickbait.

The state of social media today is so void of quality in terms of value, and the value is equated to just escapism, it's just entertainment.

People call it edutainment, but not really, there's not much education there. You need discipline to sit through a class or to sit through a lecture of somebody talking about a subject for at least half an hour, or 45 minutes.

The depth of knowledge that needs to be conveyed… it cannot be conveyed in bite size, and yet that is what the audience demand because of the nature of social media consumption.

This wealth of information abundance ends up creating a poverty of attention and when there's a poverty of attention, people can't absorb, they can't process, we end up with shallow human beings.

Look at the amount of hours, and you can just look at it on your phone to check your own habits—the amount of time that you spend on social media that you would just scroll away and you really never get anything out of it except dopamine hits—those feel-good chemicals.

The Illusion of “Intellectual Growth”

You're cheating yourself about it and you don't get the actual intellectual growth that you would have if you had just sat down read a book or sat down and have a conversation with somebody senior, somebody with experience that share valuable insights.

You get those insights regardless if you scroll through social media but the formats, the way it's conveyed, makes it very superficial.

The Irony of Valuable Content in Superficial Formats

Now the content can be gold but the way it's arranged, the way it's transmitted, the way it's absorbed… all of those are different. So if you modularise everything, if you break everything up into the atoms and molecules of it, you will see that there isn’t anything new to the concept of information.

When we come across something good, we know that it means something—that's why we bookmark it, we engage with it.

That is great but does it reach our hearts? Have we absorbed it?

You know like if it's nutrients do we really absorb it or is it just going to go through our body and end up as shit ?

Expectations for True Learning

The solution to that, or what we can do about that is to… reconfigure our minds and expectations because sometimes we seek that knowledge, we seek that solution but we don't have the patience to sit down and really dig through it.

It's fast food for the brain in terms of the habits of the eyes and brain for social media.

It's fast food so we don't have that chance to allow ourselves the time and the capacity and the absorption that's required to turn that information into knowledge because knowledge needs to be applied.