I do not know what about you, but recently I more and more feel the need to be cut off the computer, open a book or a newspaper and read quietly without being distracted. Or, to sit in front of the TV and watch a movie or a program from the beginning to the end, even if they are not masterpieces. If a person (including me) speaks of something true or wrong over TV, you see his face, facial expressions, emotions, and it is quite warm and more direct contact than the Facebook “statuses”, “likes” and comments.
Still 15-20 years ago, the psychologists in the West were recommending not to follow the news, in general. It’s all the same, they used to say, if something serious happens, you would learn all the details at work or at the hairdresser’s. Whereas the journalists, according to these experts, make money mostly reporting bad, negative, and people-defaming news, which has no practical significance in your life, but constantly keeps you in a negative field. It is true all over the world. Accidents, disasters and other crimes as an informative material are sold more than, let’s say, the fact that a deaf-and-dumb child suddenly started to talk.
These psychologists still did not know that the age of the Internet will come, and people would not only absorb the negative news, but also add their personal discontent, dissatisfaction and biliousness, making their life a perfect hell, and getting more and more stuck in perfect addiction to this virtual life. To the point, in particular, the Facebook mechanism is as such that giving a “like” to a “bilious” publication, you start receiving more of such publications, liking the “schizophrenic” post, you add the number of such entries in your feed.
The Internet, which purely theoretically is an inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge and free speech, can do exactly the opposite function, you are looking for what you want to read, and remove what you do not want. Thus, your ability of thinking critically and generally, the gift of thinking becomes blunt, because if you do not examine what you think, then you become a parrot repeating some lines of learned “truths”.
The social networks used similarly, instead of expanding the option of the choice, limit them. Because when taking the book from the bookshelf or even selecting the “button” from the TV channels, we make a choice, whereas the Facebook newsfeed “fires” at us with new information every 3-4 seconds.
I see the outcome, like in many other cases, in regulated educative work. School teaches children that they should wash their hand before eating, or they should not spoil the trees. Exactly the same way can be used to develop a new school subject, which I strongly conventionally would call a “hygiene of though”. This subject should teach how to avoid the Internet addiction and benefit from the information contained therein. Otherwise, the intellectual degradation is apparent in all areas, and the Internet contributes to it too.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
