Posted on 08/15/2009 5:17:31 AM PDT by Dallas59
Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
they left out FREEPING! now THAT'S addictive!
Ummm..., the last frontier.... to know everything... LOL...
Huh. If you google “google addiction” you get 17,800 hits!
Executive summary of article.... It’s more fun to play than to win.... :-)
Couldn't help but think about the 0bama campaign from 2008. Abstract rewards, Hope & Change. World of Ideas, but no concrete facts. Intellectual connections, he sounded intelligent and they wanted to be aligned with that intelligence. Divine meaning, do I really need to recall the stage set for his nomination?
I am beginning to think that society has collectively
reached the Peter Principle in an inverse way.
Instead of reaching our level of incompetence, we have reached our level of over competence, technically speaking.
For me, I guess it is an age thing. I hit 65 in a few weeks.
While I am very active on the internet every day, I have yet to even see twitter.
I miss the old days, when at age 14, I was typing out on a telegraph key with hams all over the world, including my first contact with the, then exotic, Philippines.
Now I am living here, and I watch young girls of 14 texting boys all over the world from their mobiles.
These are girls, by the thousands, that do not have two nickles to rub together.
I remember early contacts on telegraph key with Romanian men, operating from some communist club station.
Just a few weeks ago, however, I read about a teen girl in Romania electrocuting herself as she twittered, or whatever, on her laptop from the bathtub.
So much has changed since I operated a small 2 channel mobile telephone system (commercial) in the 80s, and had a simple Times/Sinclair as my first computer, later a C64, when I thought it was cool to be able to dial into a bulletin board.
What will be next?
Who?
I have never understood people’s fascination with the lives of celebrities.
I can only assume that the only reason that Britain still has the Royal family is that it brings in American tourist dollars.
I wouldn’t step over a crack in the sidewalk to meet a celebrity.
I can relate to this article, though not to seeking info about celebrities.
I call this “data addiction” - now intelligent and curious people have the entire world of information at their fingertips, available with the click of a mouse. It’s very addictive.
LQ
You are right. Nothing any longer feels exotic and new in the way it used to. We are rather jaded. I recall a group of cub scouts (8 year olds) back in 1985 on a field trip. One of them said, “I’m going to Hawaii” and the rest of them said, “Who HASN’T been there?” Before graduating high school many kids have partaken of most adult goodies without having to earn them in any way. There is nothing left to discover at such a young age. In the “old days” we still had a lot of unexplored territory and a lot more freedom to explore it. Googling is a search for novelty and is one of the few things left that one can do without getting licensed, screened, fingerprinted and paying a fee.
You are right. Nothing any longer feels exotic and new in the way it used to. We are rather jaded. I recall a group of cub scouts (8 year olds) back in 1985 on a field trip. One of them said, “I’m going to Hawaii” and the rest of them said, “Who HASN’T been there?” Before graduating high school many kids have partaken of most adult goodies without having to earn them in any way. There is nothing left to discover at such a young age. In the “old days” we still had a lot of unexplored territory and a lot more freedom to explore it. Googling is a search for novelty and is one of the few things left that one can do without getting licensed, screened, fingerprinted and paying a fee.
It is implied that Freeping is addictive.
An intervention is due, but have similar problems with FR and Drudge, mostly.
Following Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas on the AM was the thing that turned me into a media hound.
When we vacation, we get totally away from computers, cells and all media.
Instead of reaching our level of incompetence, we have reached our level of over competence, technically speaking.
&&&
Yeah, but the sad thing is that this very sophisticated technology is used by people to do what? The character referred to is using the iPhone to get info about celebrities. I suspect there are many actual people doing just that. We have people using texting to communicat such brilliant conversations along the lines of
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. You?”
“Nothing.”
Disheartening.
We have deluded ourselves into believing that knowledge is a substitute for thought.
Conceptually things haven’t changed. In the mid-nineteenth century people were thrilled that they could communicate so rapidly via the telegraph. It was their internet. Imagine the excitement of technology: they could send a message and have it received and answered within hours, almost anywhere in the US! It was thrilling. The old people bemoaned the death of artful correspondence of the kind Jefferson engaged in, the sort of letter-writing that with justice can be eventually collected and bound into a book. The modern people bemoaned the fact that with train transportation and the telegraph people could drop by and visit them with hardly any warning.
People don’t change.
Or even worse, you get a text message (or several) saying something like “What’s up?” / “What are you doing?” / etc.
Seems that people are wired to be addicted to gathering new bits of information. I think the key to keeping some control over your life is to at least be selective in what types of information you pursue. I choose politically Conservative web sites and blogs and a creative/technical interest of electronic music.
I think that with our advanced technological society that many people are lost and bored out of their minds with no real interests or responsibilities. Having a Job that takes up 50-60 hours a week of quality time, a spouse to interact with once I am back home, and a house and two vehicles to maintain tends to keep one very busy.
I have learned to stay off the computer on the weekends unless I’m looking for specific info. and to and keep phone calls short (I’m kinda busy right now) when I have other things to do. (Like now, right after I finish typing this.)
“Conceptually things haven’t changed.”
Yes, you are right, but now the change is exponential.
There has been more change in the last 20 years, then in
all of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.
Had to Bump your post!
Had to Bump your post!
Had to Bump your post!
RetroSexual gets you 55,100.
Well, that has been a world trend. Airports are pretty much the same where ever you go. The Beijing airport immigration area is kind of ominous looking (for a blue passport), but not all that dissimilar to other places. The Davao City international airport (the farthest into the 3rd world I've been) now looks like any other.
The difference between Tokyo at night and Times Square NYC at night are less than I would have thought (except that Tokyo is still safe).
Yes, you're correct and mostly in the wrong direction (IMO).
Regarding your tagline, may I ask where in Philippines you are? Mrs. Altair is a Filipina and our favorite place is Cebu. Mindanao is definitely the best part of the Philippines, if only it were peaceful ...
The difference between googling and TV is immense. With TV you accept whatever is thrown at you - passive. With googling you control the direction that you go - active. I'll prefer active interaction every time over passive.
Various controlled fora like this one have replaced Usenet, which used to be the best place to go interact with people all over the world before it became a spam haven.
I rather like the idea of interacting with people regardless of geographical location. I cannot see how it can be a fundamentally bad thing.
All good points. I am on Facebook, even though I am a senior citizen, but my main reason is to keep in touch with my Gen X chidren and their wives and to see the latest pics and vids of my adorable grandchild. But I can see how that site can be a huge time waster; many people seem to spend a lot of time on the dumbest of concepts while, in most cases, on their employer’s clock.
Wow! The things you learn on Free Republic using a search engine...
Doesn’t sound like it’s a bad thing though:
“A retrosexual is (in the female case) that woman who eschews the sexual-revolution plank of feminism in favor of more-traditional values... A little burlesque, a little Betty Crocker, the retrosexual woman has new-fangled spunk and old-fashioned values...”
“A retrosexual is the opposite of a metrosexual. He ia a man who spends as little time and money as possible on his appearance.”
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