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sanderk

How Procrastination Affects Your Health - Thrive Global - 0 views

thriveglobal.com/...astination-affects-your-health

procrastination health Technology

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • fine line between procrastination and being “pressure prompted.” If you’re like me and pressure prompted, you are someone who often does your best work when faced with a looming deadline. While being pressure prompted may entail a bit of procrastination, it is procrastination within acceptable limits. In other words, it is a set of conditions that offers just enough pressure to ensure you’re at the top of your game without divulging into chaos or most importantly, impacting other members of your team by preventing them from delivering their best work in a timely manner.
  • Procrastination is a condition that has consequences on one’s mental and physical health and performance at school and in the workplace.
  • Piers Steel defines procrastination as “a self-regulatory failure leading to poor performance and reduced well-being.” Notably, Steel further emphasizes that procrastination is both common (80% to 90% of college-age students suffer from it at least some of the time) and something most people (95%) wish to overcome.
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  • Steel even argues that procrastination may now be on the rise as people increasingly turn to the immediate gratification made possible by information technologies and specifically, social media platforms.
  • for a small percentage of people, procrastination isn’t just a temporary or occasional problem but rather something that comes to structure their lives and ultimately limit their potential.
  • In a 2008 study, Peter Gröpel & Piers Steel investigated predictors of procrastination in a large Internet-based study that included over 9,000 participants. Their results revealed two important findings. First, their results showed that goal setting reduced procrastination; second, they found that it was strongly associated with lack of energy.
  • While it is true that intrinsically motivated people may have an easier time getting into flow, anyone, even a chronic procrastinator, can cultivate flow. The first step is easy—it simply entails coming up with a clear goal.
  • The second step is to stop feeling ashamed about your procrastinating tendencies.
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    This article is very interesting because it says that procrastination is not necessarily bad. Procrastination can be good for people in small quantities because it causes them to be pressured into actually doing their work. However, there is a point where procrastination becomes an issue. I find it interesting how phones and computers have caused procrastination problems to become more severe. Phones and computers can give people instant gratification which leads to more procrastination. As the article says if people set goals for themselves and are disciplined they can overcome procrastination.
caelengrubb

Anxiety, loneliness and Fear of Missing Out: The impact of social media on young people... - 0 views

www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/...ia-young-peoples-mental-health

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • By 2021, it is forecast that there will be around 3 billion active monthly users of social media. From the statistics alone, it’s clear that social media has become an integral (and to a large extent, unavoidable) part of our lives.
  • One implication of social media’s rapid rise, that of its relationship with young people’s mental health, has gathered a significant amount of attention in recent years.
  • So-called ‘social media addiction’ has been referred to by a wide variety of studies and experiments. It is thought that addiction to social media affects around 5% of young people, and was recently described as potentially more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes
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  • The ‘urge’ to check one’s social media may be linked to both instant gratification (the need to experience fast, short term pleasure) and dopamine production (the chemical in the brain associated with reward and pleasure).
  • The popular concept of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) refers to ‘a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent’ and is ‘characterised by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing’.
  • Data from qualitative studies has shown that using social media compulsively can damage sleeping patterns, having an adverse effect on young people’s performance in school
  • The University of Glasgow found that young people found it difficult to relax following night time social media use, reducing their brain’s ability to prepare for sleep. Sleep loss works in a vicious cycle of reinforcement with mental health; that is, that loss of sleep due to night time social media use can lead to poorer mental health, and poor mental health can lead to intense night time use and sleep loss
  • What is dangerous about this compulsive use is that, if gratification is not experienced, users may internalise beliefs that this is due to being ‘unpopular’, ‘unfunny’ etc. A lack of ‘likes’ on a status update may cause negative self-reflection, prompting continual ‘refreshing’ of the page in the hope of seeing that another person has ‘enjoyed’ the post, thus helping to achieve personal validation.
  • FOMO has been linked to intensive social media use and is associated with lower mood and life satisfaction.
  • Social media has been linked to poor self-esteem and self-image through the advent of image manipulation on photo sharing platforms. In particular, the notion of the ‘idealised body image’ has arguably been detrimental to self-esteem and image, especially that of young women. The 24/7 circulation of easily viewable manipulated images promotes and entrenches unrealistic expectations of how young people should look and behave.
  • The evidence suggests that social media use is strongly associated with anxiety, loneliness and depression
Javier E

TikTok Brain Explained: Why Some Kids Seem Hooked on Social Video Feeds - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...social-video-feeds-11648866192

video social media children inattention attention gratification psychology brain science technology

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Remember the good old days when kids just watched YouTube all day? Now that they binge on 15-second TikToks, those YouTube clips seem like PBS documentaries.
  • Many parents tell me their kids can’t sit through feature-length films anymore because to them the movies feel painfully slow. Others have observed their kids struggling to focus on homework. And reading a book? Forget about it.
  • What is happening to kids’ brains?
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  • “It is hard to look at increasing trends in media consumption of all types, media multitasking and rates of ADHD in young people and not conclude that there is a decrease in their attention span,
  • Emerging research suggests that watching short, fast-paced videos makes it harder for kids to sustain activities that don’t offer instant—and constant—gratification.
  • One of the few studies specifically examining TikTok-related effects on the brain focused on Douyin, the TikTok equivalent in China, made by the same Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd. It found that the personalized videos the app’s recommendation engine shows users activate the reward centers of the brain, as compared with the general-interest videos shown to new users.
  • Brain scans of Chinese college students showed that areas involved in addiction were highly activated in those who watched personalized videos.
  • It also found some people have trouble controlling when to stop watching.
  • attention. “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast,”
  • A TikTok spokeswoman said the company wants younger teens to develop positive digital habits early on, and that it recently made some changes aimed at curbing extensive app usage. For example, TikTok won’t allow users ages 13 to 15 to receive push notifications after 9 p.m. TikTok also periodically reminds users to take a break to go outside or grab a snack.
  • Kids have a hard time pulling away from videos on YouTube, too, and Google has made several changes to help limit its use, including turning off autoplay by default on accounts of people under 18.
  • When kids do things that require prolonged focus, such as reading or solving math problems, they’re using directed attention
  • This function starts in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision making and impulse control.
  • “Directed attention is the ability to inhibit distractions and sustain attention and to shift attention appropriately. It requires higher-order skills like planning and prioritizing,”
  • Kids generally have a harder time doing this—and putting down their videogame controllers—because the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25.
  • “We speculate that individuals with lower self-control ability have more difficulty shifting attention away from favorite video stimulation,
  • “In the short-form snackable world, you’re getting quick hit after quick hit, and as soon as it’s over, you have to make a choice,” said Mass General’s Dr. Marci, who wrote the new book “Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age.” The more developed the prefrontal cortex, the better the choices.
  • Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gets released in the brain when it’s expecting a reward. A flood of dopamine reinforces cravings for something enjoyable, whether it’s a tasty meal, a drug or a funny TikTok video.
  • “TikTok is a dopamine machine,” said John Hutton, a pediatrician and director of the Reading & Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “If you want kids to pay attention, they need to practice paying attention.”
  • Researchers are just beginning to conduct long-term studies on digital media’s effects on kids’ brains. The National Institutes of Health is funding a study of nearly 12,000 adolescents as they grow into adulthood to examine the impact that many childhood experiences—from social media to smoking—have on cognitive development.
  • she predicts they will find that when brains repeatedly process rapid, rewarding content, their ability to process less-rapid, less-rewarding things “may change or be harmed.”
  • “It’s like we’ve made kids live in a candy store and then we tell them to ignore all that candy and eat a plate of vegetables,”
  • “We have an endless flow of immediate pleasures that’s unprecedented in human history.”
  • Parents and kids can take steps to boost attention, but it takes effort
  • Swap screen time for real time. Exercise and free play are among the best ways to build attention during childhood,
  • “Depriving kids of tech doesn’t work, but simultaneously reducing it and building up other things, like playing outside, does,”
  • Practice restraint.
  • “When you practice stopping, it strengthens those connections in the brain to allow you to stop again next time.”
  • Use tech’s own tools. TikTok has a screen-time management setting that allows users to cap their app usage.
  • Ensure good sleep. Teens are suffering from a sleep deficit.
Javier E

The 'E-Pimps' of OnlyFans - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-pimps-onlyfans.html

social media psychology sex exploitation commercial business model technology

shared by Javier E on 17 May 22 - No Cached
  • Over the course of two dozen interviews spanning six countries, I’ve discovered a thriving warren of companies employing a similar business model, using ghostwriters on OnlyFans to provide digital intimacy at scale. These agencies operate, out of necessity, a little below the radar. They collectively represent hundreds of models, and some claim to bring in profits that can range into the seven figures annually.
  • OnlyFans started in 2016, and has since emerged as the top platform worldwide for creators to sell monthly subscriptions for self-produced erotic content. The platform has become synonymous with this sort of business, though some use it for other purposes.
  • The real product is relationships. Money from subscriptions can be trivial compared with the profits earned by selling custom videos, sexting sessions and other forms of fan interaction that require more concerted engagement than simply posting to a feed.
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  • Above all, the manual emphasized efficiency. Managers were told to answer DMs in less than five minutes, since users were coming to OnlyFans for immediate gratification and would go elsewhere if ignored. It encouraged the creation of keyboard shortcuts, so that managers could deploy an arsenal of rote sexual phrases with a few keystrokes, steering conversations toward the hard sell. It also outlined a series of strategies to boost engagement on the pages, including a gambit in which models would offer to rate a picture of a subscriber’s penis for a fee.
  • “Every page needs to have an established back story to make the person seem more believable,” it stated. OnlyFans works because people pay for a connection that feels deeper than porn. The document encouraged Ekko’s employees, called page managers, to identify “big spenders” who would part ways with more than $200 in short order, and cultivate a deep rapport by asking about their life and what they do for a living.
  • This can be extremely time-consuming: In an interview with this magazine last year, an OnlyFans creator said she spends six hours a day just sexting with subscribers. But these relationships are important to cultivate. In a blog post on its website, OnlyFans encourages creators to cater to their “superfans,” who pay for custom content and will “give more if they feel they’re getting something special.”
  • But all of them take advantage of the same raw materials: the endless reproducibility of digital images; the widespread global availability of cheap English-speaking labor; and the world’s unquenchable desire for companionship.
  • The key to this business model is the ready availability of cheap English-speaking labor around the globe. Job postings for OnlyFans chatters are widespread on freelance sites like Upwork, many offering as little as $3 an hour. Agency heads told me they’ve hired workers from Eastern Europe, Africa and all across Southeast Asia. “At the end of the day, it is a geo-arbitrage business,”
  • This phenomenon is part of a broader boom in homespun online businesses that connect cheap developing-world labor with American consumers, allowing the proprietor to step back and reap the profits
  • During his stint as a chatter, Andre has become intimately familiar with the quirks and desires of the subscribers. Over time, he’s learned something of a sex-work cliché: More than sexual gratification, he said, many of the guys just want someone to talk to
katieb0305

Your happiness type matters - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...happy-genes

shared by katieb0305 on 30 May 16 - No Cached
  • You feel happiness all the way down to your genes, scientists say. But the kind of happiness you're feeling matters, as different kinds can have wildly different effects on your physical well-being.
  • he happiness you get from instant gratification -- eating that giant cupcake or buying that fabulous pair of shoes -- may have the same physical impact on your genes as depression or stress,
  • The experts divide well-being into two different types: hedonic and eudaimonic. These are fancy words to describe happiness that comes from two different sources.
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  • Hedonic well-being comes from an experience a person seeks out that gives them pleasure.
  • Eudaimonic well-being is a kind of happiness that comes not from consuming something but from a sustained effort at working toward something bigger than you.
  • they can and do influence each other, so it has been hard for scientists to measure which kind has had a greater positive influence on someone's physical or psychological well-being.
  • there is an increased expression of genes involved in inflammation and a decreased antiviral response. People who are subjected to long periods of stress have white blood cells that make slightly more pro-inflammatory proteins on a constant basis.
  • Bottom line? Happiness that comes from working for the greater good has a much more positive genetic impact.
  • The people who found happiness by pursuing a greater good had a lower level of this inflammatory gene expression and strong antiviral and antibody gene expression.
Javier E

Sleight of the 'Invisible Hand' - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...sleight-of-the-invisible-hand

Adam Smith analytic philosophy economics politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • The wealthy, says Smith, spend their days establishing an “economy of greatness,” one founded on “luxury and caprice” and fueled by “the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires.” Any broader benefit that accrues from their striving is not the consequence of foresight or benevolence, but “in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity.” They don’t do good, they are led to it.
  • Smith described this state of affairs as “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” and he knew that it made for the revolutionary implication of his work. It shifted the way we thought about the relationship between government action and economic growth, making less means more the rebuttable presumption of policy proposals.
  • What it did not do, however, was void any proposal outright, much less prove that all government activity was counterproductive. Smith held that the sovereign had a role supporting education, building infrastructure and public institutions, and providing security from foreign and domestic threats — initiatives that should be paid for, in part, by a progressive tax code and duties on luxury goods. He even believed the government had a “duty” to protect citizens from “oppression,” the inevitable tendency of the strong to take advantage of the ignorance and necessity of the weak.
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  • In other words, the invisible hand did not solve the problem of politics by making politics altogether unnecessary. “We don’t think government can solve all our problems,” President Obama said in his convention address, “But we don’t think that government is the source of all our problems.” Smith would have appreciated this formulation. For him, whether government should get out of the way in any given matter, economic or otherwise, was a question for considered judgment abetted by scientific inquiry.
  • politics is a practical venture, and Smith distrusted those statesmen who confused their work with an exercise in speculative philosophy. Their proposals should be judged not by the delusive lights of the imagination, but by the metrics of science and experience, what President Obama described in the first presidential debate as “math, common sense and our history.”
  • John Paul Rollert teaches business ethics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and leadership at the Harvard Extension School.  He is the author of a recent paper on President Obama’s “Empathy Standard” for the Yale Law Journal Online.
  • Adam Smith, analytic philosophy, economics, Elections 2012
  • Javier E on 22 Oct 12
     
    "Adam Smith, analytic philosophy, economics"
Javier E

Kids' Cognition Is Changing-Education Will Have to Change With It - Megan Garber - Tech... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...253782

cognition technology education skills social media internet

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report about the cognitive future of the millennial generation. Based on surveys with more than 1,000 thought leaders -- among them danah boyd, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, and Alexandra Samuel -- the survey asked thinkers to consider how the Internet and its environment are changing, for better or worse, kids' cognitive capabilities.
  • The survey found, overall, what many others already have: that neuroplasticity is, indeed, a thing; that multitasking is, indeed, the new norm; that hyperconnectivity may be leading to a lack of patience and concentration; and that an "always on" ethos may be encouraging a culture of expectation and instant gratification.
  • also found, however, another matter of general consensus among the experts they surveyed: that our education systems will need to be updated, drastically, to suit the new realities of the intellectual environment. "There is a palpable concern among these experts," Rainie puts it, "that new social and economic divisions will emerge as those who are motivated and well-schooled reap rewards that are not matched by those who fail to master new media and tech literacies."
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  • It also offers its experts' predictions about what the most-desired life skills (for young people, but ostensibly for everyone else, too) will be in the year 2020. Among the skills they highlighted: public problem-solving through cooperative work -- crowdsourcing and the like; the ability to search effectively for information online; the ability to distinguish the quality and veracity of online discoveries; the ability to synthesize, or combine facts and details from different sources into coherent narratives; the ability to concentrate; and the ability to distinguish between the signal and the noise as the information we're exposed to gets bigger, and broader, and more plentiful.
  • All these skills can be taught. The question is whether kids will learn them in school, or outside of it.
sissij

There Is No Such Thing as Alternative Medicine | Big Think - 1 views

bigthink.com/...-thing-as-alternative-medicine

alternative medicine science bias

shared by sissij on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Unfortunately for Hahnemann his philosophy—the less of an active ingredient remains the more powerful a remedy is (once you reach 13c on the homeopathic scale there is no longer any active ingredient left)—is nonsense.
  • This does not stop the irrational stream of unproven (or disproven) therapies arising from the holistic and wellness sphere.
  • Distrust in one doctor should not imply blind faith in another.
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  • Yet a growing suspicion of corporate and political interests in the sixties inspired a new wave of holism that’s gaining strength a half-century later. We’re right to be wary of corporate agendas and political mismanagement when it comes to healthcare.
  • The reality is the most basic advice—move often and diversely; eat a balanced, whole foods diet—is boring in an age of immediate gratification.
  • The alternative is suffering, something many companies and hucksters willfully champion at a time when we can all use less of it.
  • sissij on 28 Feb 17
     
    People have been searching for more powerful and more efficient medicines. All sorts of weird ideas pop up as people try out different possibilities. Although people believe in science today, they are still willing to try out different things. Alternative medicine is where people like to spend their money on. When it comes to health, people are likely to be superstitious. Many people don't go to the doctors until the last minute. They tends to rely more on their own senses and perception when it comes to their life. I think it's because going to doctor is like trusting another person with your life, which is very hard for people. Seeking for alternative medicine give people a feeling that they can avoid the doctors. Like the medicine of eternity back in time, the alternative medicine today uses the same flaws in our reasoning. --Sissi (2/28/2017)
Javier E

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3806504577181351486558984.html

adolescence teenage brain research development learning experience brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 12 - Cached
  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
  • The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
  • The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
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  • adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.
  • What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.
  • Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
  • Expertise comes with experience.
  • In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
  • In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood
  • In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.
  • The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.
  • An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school
  • children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.
  • this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
  • First, experience shapes the brain.
  • the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses
  • Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature
  • there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.
  • Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.
  • But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised
  • Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship
  • Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.
  • Javier E on 05 Feb 12
     
    The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
Javier E

The Poverty of an Idea - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-poverty-of-an-idea.html

poverty culture development theory social science

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 12 - Cached
  • THE libertarian writer Charles Murray has probably done more than any other contemporary thinker to keep alive the idea of a “culture of poverty,” the theory that poor people are trapped by distorted norms and aspirations and not merely material deprivation.
  • Harrington had picked up the idea of a “culture of poverty” from the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, whose 1959 study of Mexican slum dwellers identified a “subculture” of lowered aspirations and short-term gratification. Echoing Lewis, Harrington argued that American poverty constituted “a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” It would not be solved merely by economic expansion or moral exhortation, he contended, but by a “comprehensive assault on poverty.”
  • In his view, these problems were not a judgment on the poor as individuals, but on a society indifferent to their plight. His popularization of the phrase “culture of poverty” has unintended consequences. There was nothing  in the “vicious circle” of pathology he sketched that was culturally determined, but in the hands of others, the idea came to signify an ingrained system of norms passed from generation to generation.
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  • Conservatives took the attitudes and behaviors Harrington saw as symptoms of poverty and portrayed them as its direct causes.
  • In his 1984 book, “Losing Ground,” Mr. Murray argued that welfare programs abet rather than ameliorate poverty. The book dismissed Harrington’s prescription for ending poverty, and Harrington returned the favor. In “The New American Poverty,” published the same year, he called Mr. Murray the right-wing equivalent of a “vulgar Marxist,” a social theorist who believed in a “one-to-one relationship between the economic and the political or the psychological.”
  • Harrington’s culture-of-poverty thesis was at best an ambiguous impediment to understanding — in later books, he made no use of the term. But in its moral clarity, “The Other America” was ultimately optimistic; it was less an indictment and more an appeal to Americans to live up to their better instincts.
Javier E

Elon studies future of "Generation Always-On" - 1 views

www.elon.edu/...Note.aspx

cognition technology education skills social media internet

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Elon studies the future of "Generation Always-On"
  • By the year 2020, it is expected that youth of the “always-on generation,” brought up from childhood with a continuous connection to each other and to information, will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who count on the Internet as their external brain and who approach problems in a different way from their elders. "There is no doubt that brains are being rewired,"
  • the Internet Center, refers to the teens-to-20s age group born since the turn of the century as Generation AO, for “always-on." “They have grown up in a world that has come to offer them instant access to nearly the entirety of human knowledge, and incredible opportunities to connect, create and collaborate,"
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  • some said they are already witnessing deficiencies in young peoples’ abilities to focus their attention, be patient and think deeply. Some experts expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people become shallow consumers of information, endangering society."
  • Many of the respondents in this survey predict that Gen AO will exhibit a thirst for instant gratification and quick fixes and a lack of patience and deep-thinking ability due to what one referred to as “fast-twitch wiring.”
  • “The replacement of memorization by analysis will be the biggest boon to society since the coming of mass literacy in the late 19th to early 20th century.” — Paul Jones, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
  • “Teens find distraction while working, distraction while driving, distraction while talking to the neighbours. Parents and teachers will have to invest major time and efforts into solving this issue – silence zones, time-out zones, meditation classes without mobile, lessons in ignoring people.”
  • “Society is becoming conditioned into dependence on technology in ways that, if that technology suddenly disappears or breaks down, will render people functionally useless. What does that mean for individual and social resiliency?
  • “Short attention spans resulting from quick interactions will be detrimental to focusing on the harder problems and we will probably see a stagnation in many areas: technology, even social venues such as literature. The people who will strive and lead the charge will be the ones able to disconnect themselves to focus.”
  • “The underlying issue is that they will become dependent on the Internet in order to solve problems and conduct their personal, professional, and civic lives. Thus centralized powers that can control access to the Internet will be able to significantly control future generations. It will be much as in Orwell's 1984, where control was achieved by using language to shape and limit thought, so future regimes may use control of access to the Internet to shape and limit thought.”
  • “Increasingly, teens and young adults rely on the first bit of information they find on a topic, assuming that they have found the ‘right’ answer, rather than using context and vetting/questioning the sources of information to gain a holistic view of a topic.”
  • “Parents and kids will spend less time developing meaningful and bonded relationships in deference to the pursuit and processing of more and more segmented information competing for space in their heads, slowly changing their connection to humanity.”
  • “It’s simply not possible to discuss, let alone form societal consensus around major problems without lengthy, messy conversations about those problems. A generation that expects to spend 140 or fewer characters on a topic and rejects nuance is incapable of tackling these problems.”
Javier E

Learning How to Exert Self-Control - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...learning-self-control.html

self-control satisfaction distraction distance goal mission

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Part of what adults need to learn about self-control is in those videos of 5-year-olds. The children who succeed turn their backs on the cookie, push it away, pretend it’s something nonedible like a piece of wood, or invent a song. Instead of staring down the cookie, they transform it into something with less of a throbbing pull on them.
  • Adults can use similar methods of distraction and distancing, he says. Don’t eye the basket of bread; just take it off the table. In moments of emotional distress, imagine that you’re viewing yourself from outside, or consider what someone else would do in your place. When a waiter offers chocolate mousse, imagine that a cockroach has just crawled across it
  • “If you change how you think about it, its impact on what you feel and do changes,”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • there are two warring parts of the brain: a hot part demanding immediate gratification (the limbic system), and a cool, goal-oriented part (the prefrontal cortex). The secret of self-control, he says, is to train the prefrontal cortex to kick in first.
  • To do this, use specific if-then plans, like “If it’s before noon, I won’t check email” or “If I feel angry, I will count backward from 10.” Done repeatedly, this buys a few seconds to at least consider your options. The point isn’t to be robotic and never eat chocolate mousse again. It’s to summon self-control when you want it, and be able to carry out long-term plans.
  • “We don’t need to be victims of our emotions,” Mr. Mischel says. “We have a prefrontal cortex that allows us to evaluate whether or not we like the emotions that are running us.
  • Self-control alone doesn’t guarantee success. People also need a “burning goal” that gives them a reason to activate these skills, he says. His students all have the sitzfleisch to get into graduate school, but the best ones also have a burning question they want to answer in their work, sometimes stemming from their own lives
  • His secret seems to come straight from the marshmallow test: distraction. “It’s to keep living in a way one wants to live and work; to distract constructively; to distract in ways that are in themselves satisfying; to do things that are intrinsically gratifying,” he says
Javier E

It's Not Just About Bad Choices - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ot-just-about-bad-choices.html

responsibility choice poverty mental health stress mental tax IQ conservatism

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • WHENEVER I write about people who are struggling, I hear from readers who say something like: Folks need to stop whining and get a job. It’s all about personal responsibility.
  • In a 2014 poll, Republicans were twice as likely to say that people are poor because of individual failings as to say the reason is lack of opportunity (Democrats thought the opposite). I decided to ask some of the poor w
  • Too often, I believe, liberals deny that poverty is linked to bad choices. As Phillips and many other poor people acknowledge, of course, it is.
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  • Self-destructive behaviors — dropping out of school, joining a gang, taking drugs, bearing children when one isn’t ready — compound poverty.
  • Yet scholars are also learning to understand the roots of these behaviors, and they’re far more complicated than the conservative narrative of human weakness.
  • For starters, there is growing evidence that poverty and mental health problems are linked in complex, reinforcing ways
  • If you’re battling mental health problems, or grow up with traumas like domestic violence (or seeing your brother shot dead), you’re more likely to have trouble in school, to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol, to have trouble in relationships.
  • A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of cognitive bandwidth.
  • Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.
  • It turns out that when people have elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, they are less willing to delay gratification.
  • it’s circumstances that can land you in a situation where it’s really hard to make a good decision because you’re so stressed out. And the ones you get wrong matter much more, because there’s less slack to play with.”
  • That emphasis on personal responsibility is part of the 12-step program to confront alcoholism or drug addiction, and it may be useful for people like Jackson. But for society to place the blame entirely on the individual seems to me a cop-out.
  • Let’s also remember, though, that today we have randomized trials — the gold standard of evidence — showing that certain social programs make self-destructive behaviors less common.
  • as long as we’re talking about personal irresponsibility, let’s also examine our own. Don’t we have a collective responsibility to provide more of a fair start in life to all, so that children aren’t propelled toward bad choices?
Javier E

New Study: Burn it All (Fossil Fuel), Lose it All (Antarctic Ice and Today's Coasts) - ... - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...ntarctic-ice-and-todays-coasts

global warming carbon Antarctica

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The modeling study is far more a thought experiment than a prediction, given that, even in China, there is every indication that the world’s coal, particularly, will not all be exploited.
  • the loss of the entire Antarctic ice sheet would take millenniums, but up to 100 feet of sea level rise could result within 1,000 years, with the rate of the rise beginning to increase a century or two from now. That finding meshes with the 2014 paper on the “collapse” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
  • In interviews, scientists said that such long-term risks raise profound moral questions for people of today. “What right do we have to do things that, even if they don’t affect us, are going to be someone else’s problem a thousand years from now?” asked Ian Joughin, an ice sheet expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new research. “Is it fair to do that so we can go on burning fuel as fast as we can?”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)
  • It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.
  • Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.
Javier E

Mannequins Give Shape to a Venezuelan Fantasy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ape-to-venezuelan-fantasy.html

beauty latin america Venezuela surgery sexism culture fantasy

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Eliezer Álvarez made a simple observation: Venezuelan women were increasingly using plastic surgery to transform their bodies, yet the mannequins in clothing stores did not reflect these new, often extreme proportions.
  • So he went back to his workshop and created the kind of woman he thought the public wanted — one with a bulging bosom and cantilevered buttocks, a wasp waist and long legs, a fiberglass fantasy, Venezuelan style
  • Now his mannequins, and others like them, have become the standard in stores across Venezuela, serving as an exaggerated, sometimes polarizing, vision of the female form that calls out from the doorways of tiny shops
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  • “You see a woman like this and you say, ‘Wow, I want to look like her,’ ” said Reina Parada, as she sanded a mannequin torso in the workshop. Although she cannot afford it, she said, she would like to get implant surgery someday. “It gives you better self-esteem.”
  • Cosmetic procedures are so fashionable here that a woman with implants is often casually referred to as “an operated woman.” Women freely talk about their surgeries, and mannequin makers jokingly refer to the creations as being “operated” as well.
  • The embrace of plastic surgery clashes with the government’s socialist ideology and frequent talk of creating a society free of the taint of commercialism.
  • the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves — has long fed a culture of easy money and consumerism here, along with a penchant for the quick fix and instant gratification.
  • “Venezuela is known for its oil, and it’s known for its beauty,”
  • Beauty took on a particularly important role in the late 1970s and ’80s when the country’s beauty queens, already a national obsession, were crowned Miss Universe three times.
  • And the beauty queens’ fame helped fuel a fascination with cosmetic surgery and procedures like breast implants, tummy tucks, nose jobs and injections to firm the buttocks.
  • For Mr. Sousa, beauty really is skin deep: “I say that inner beauty doesn’t exist. That’s something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves.”
kushnerha

BBC - Capital - The best new way to learn a language? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...st-new-way-to-learn-a-language

shared economy bbc language technology

shared by kushnerha on 28 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • As an Uber driver, Choudhary has to use an English-language app day in, day out, and he has found it has significantly improved his language skills.
  • now working for so-called shared economy platforms – business models that allow individuals to borrow or make use of assets or services offered by somebody else – such as Uber, Airbnb, freelance marketplace Fiverr and clothing hire platform Rent the Runway. Since these app-based businesses work primarily in English, Indians who work with them every day are improving their language skills as a side-effect.
  • some people deliberately choose to travel with Airbnb because it means their children can interact with other children and have exposure to other languages.” 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Although he already speaks English well, he says meeting native speakers has been helpful for picking up new phrases and mastering the art of both British and American slang.
  • Language teachers aren’t surprised by the trend, and see it as a natural progression given improved access to technology in countries like India. “In a developing country many people don’t have the disposable income to invest in self-improvement with things like language lessons. But access to the internet creates opportunities for self-directed study and to learn from the wealth of English language [content] available,”
  • “Smart learning is all about learning the English you need to deal with day-to-day situations that you may encounter. The instant gratification of learning something and being able to apply it in a meaningful way is a huge motivator,”
Javier E

Addicted to Distraction - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...addicted-to-distraction.html

distraction internet social context addiction focus psychology

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus.
  • All my life, reading books has been a deep and consistent source of pleasure, learning and solace. Now the books I regularly purchased were piling up ever higher on my bedside table, staring at me in silent rebuke.
  • Instead of reading them, I was spending too many hours online,
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  • “The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention,” Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” “We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.”
  • Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life
  • Denial is any addict’s first defense. No obstacle to recovery is greater than the infinite capacity to rationalize our compulsive behaviors
  • According to one recent survey, the average white-collar worker spends about six hours a day on email.
  • The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.
  • Endless access to new information also easily overloads our working memory. When we reach cognitive overload, our ability to transfer learning to long-term memory significantly deteriorates.
  • By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet. It has arguably replaced work itself as our most socially sanctioned addictio
  • t we humans have a very limited reservoir of will and discipline. We’re far more likely to succeed by trying to change one behavior at a time, ideally at the same time each day, so that it becomes a habit, requiring less and less energy to sustain.
  • Now it was time to detox. I interpreted the traditional second step — belief that a higher power could help restore my sanity — in a more secular way. The higher power became my 30-year-old daughter, who disconnected my phone and laptop from both my email and the Web.
  • During those first few days, I did suffer withdrawal pangs, most of all the hunger to call up Google and search for an answer to some question that arose. But with each passing day offline, I felt more relaxed, less anxious, more able to focus and less hungry for the next shot of instant but short-lived stimulation. What happened to my brain is exactly what I hoped would happen: It began to quiet down.
  • I had brought more than a dozen books of varying difficulty and length on my vacation. I started with short nonfiction, and then moved to longer nonfiction as I began to feel calmer and my focus got stronger. I eventually worked my way up to “The Emperor of All Maladies
  • I am back at work now, and of course I am back online. The Internet isn’t going away, and it will continue to consume a lot of my attention. My aim now is to find the best possible balance between time online and time off
  • I also make it my business now to take on more fully absorbing activities as part of my days. Above all, I’ve kept up reading books, not just because I love them, but also as a continuing attention-building practice.
  • I’ve retained my longtime ritual of deciding the night before on the most important thing I can accomplish the next morning. That’s my first work activity most days, for 60 to 90 minutes without interruption. Afterward, I take a 10- to 15-minute break to quiet my mind and renew my energy.
  • If I have other work during the day that requires sustained focus, I go completely offline for designated periods, repeating my morning ritual. In the evening, when I go up to my bedroom, I nearly always leave my digital devices downstairs.
Javier E

A smarter way to think about willpower - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rter-way-think-about-willpower

self-control discipline habits psychology brain science science

shared by Javier E on 18 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • in a self-report questionnaire completed by more than 80,000 American adults, self-control ranked lowest among 24 strengths of character.
  • three out of four parents said they thought self-control has declined in the past half-century.
  • Without a time machine that allows us to travel backward and compare Americans from different decades on the same self-control measures, we can’t be sure. Indeed, the scant scientific evidence on the question suggests that if anything, the capacity to delay gratification may be increasing.
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  • there are plenty of behaviors that require self-control that have held steady or even improved in recent decades
  • Cigarette smoking has fallen sharply since the Mad Men days.
  • Alcohol consumption peaked in 1980 and has fallen back to the same level as 1960
  • Seat belts,
  • are now used by 9 out of 10 motorists.
  • the ratio of household consumption to household net worth just hit a postwar low: In 2018 consumption was 13.2 percent of net worth, down from 16.3 percent in 1946.
  • it isn’t clear that savings habits have worsened since World War II.
  • Nevertheless, like every generation before us, we crave more self-control.
  • science shows that helping people do better in the internal tug-of-war of self-control depends on creating the right external environment.
  • some temptations require hard paternalism
  • some choices are not in our best interest. Taxing, regulating, restricting or even banning especially addictive drugs may lead to more freedom
  • Cellphones and soda
  • the benefits of constraining access may, in some cases, justify the costs
  • we recommend nudges — subtle changes in how choices are framed that make doing what’s in our long-term interest more obvious, easier or more attractiv
  • deploy science-backed strategies that make self-control easier.
  • putting temptations out of sight and out of reach:
  • disabling apps that, upon reflection, do more harm than good.
  • Anything you can do to put time and effort between you and indulgence makes self-control easier.
Javier E

The Jordan Peterson Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jordan-peterson-moment.html

male postmodernism stoicism chaos barbarism intellectual psychology

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Jordan Peterson is the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now, and he has a point. Peterson, a University of Toronto psychologist, has found his real home on YouTube, where his videos have attracted something like 40 million views.
  • In his videos, he analyzes classic and biblical texts, he eviscerates identity politics and political correctness and, most important, he delivers stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be honorable, upright and self-disciplined — how to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives.
  • Parents, universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to give many young men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live. Peterson has filled the gap.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • The implied readers of his work are men who feel fatherless, solitary, floating in a chaotic moral vacuum, constantly outperformed and humiliated by women, haunted by pain and self-contempt. At some level Peterson is offering assertiveness training to men whom society is trying to turn into emasculated snowflakes.
  • Peterson gives them a chance to be strong. He inspires their idealism by telling them that life is hard. His worldview begins with the belief that life is essentially a series of ruthless dominance competitions.
  • For much of Western history, he argues, Christianity restrained the human tendency toward barbarism. But God died in the 19th century, and Christian dogma and discipline died with him
  • That gave us the age of ideology, the age of fascism and communism — and with it, Auschwitz, Dachau and the gulag.
  • Since then we’ve tried another way to pacify the race. Since most conflict is over values, we’ve decided to not have any values. We’ll celebrate relativism and tolerance
  • We deny the true nature of humanity and naïvely pretend everyone is nice. The upside is we haven’t blown ourselves up; the downside is we live in a world of normlessness, meaninglessness and chaos.
  • All of life is perched, Peterson continues, on the point between order and chaos
  • Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters. … Most men do not meet female human standards.”
  • Don’t be fooled by the naïve optimism of progressive ideology. Life is about remorseless struggle and pain. Your instinct is to whine, to play the victim, to seek vengeance.
  • Peterson tells young men to never do that. Rise above the culture of victimization you see all around you
  • “The individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike.”
  • Instead, choose discipline, courage and self-sacrifice. “To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life.” Never lie. Tell your boss what you really think. Be strict with your children.
  • His recipe for self-improvement is solitary, nonrelational, unemotional. I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.
  • But the emphasis on strength of will, the bootstrap, the calls to toughness and self-respect — all of this touches some need in his audience. He doesn’t comfort
  • And Peterson personifies the strong, courageous virtues he champions. His most recent viral video, with over four million views, is an interview he did with Cathy Newman of Britain’s Channel 4 News.
  • , as Conor Friedersdorf noted in The Atlantic, she did what a lot of people do in argument these days. Instead of actually listening to Peterson, she just distorted, simplified and restated his views to make them appear offensive and cartoonish.
  • Peterson calmly and comprehensibly corrected and rebutted her. It is the most devastatingly one-sided media confrontation you will ever see. He reminded me of a young William F. Buckley.
  • The Peterson way is a harsh way, but it is an idealistic way — and for millions of young men, it turns out to be the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which they are raised
Javier E

Revisiting the prophetic work of Neil Postman about the media » MercatorNet - 1 views

mercatornet.com/...68239

postman media analysis social media psychology brain science technology education

shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.
  • “We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”
  • What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Postman also recognised that technology was changing our mental processes and social habits.
  • Today corporations like Google and Amazon collect data on Internet users based on their browsing history, the things they purchase, and the apps they use
  • Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us,
  • “Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organisations, but have solved very little of importance to most people, and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”
  • “Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”
  • As a student of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman believed that the medium of information was critical to understanding its social and political effects. Every technology has its own agenda. Postman worried that the very nature of television undermined American democratic institutions.
  • Many Americans tuned in to the presidential debate looking for something substantial and meaty
  • It was simply another manifestation of the incoherence and vitriol of cable news
  • “When, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” warned Postman.
  • Technology Is Never Neutral
  • As for new problems, we have increased addictions (technological and pornographic); increased loneliness, anxiety, and distraction; and inhibited social and intellectual maturation.
  • The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
  • This is far truer of the Internet and social media, where more than a third of Americans, and almost half of young people, now get their news.
  • with smartphones now ubiquitous, the Internet has replaced television as the “background radiation of the social and intellectual universe.”
  • Is There Any Solution?
  • Reading news or commentary in print, in contrast, requires concentration, patience, and careful reflection, virtues that our digital age vitiates.
  • Politics as Entertainment
  • “How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged,” observed Postman. In the case of politics, television fashions public discourse into yet another form of entertainment
  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. … They tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them.
  • The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • Such is the case with the way politics is “advertised” to different subsets of the American electorate. The “consumer,” depending on his political leanings, may be manipulated by fears of either an impending white-nationalist, fascist dictatorship, or a radical, woke socialist takeover.
  • This paradigm is aggravated by the hypersiloing of media content, which explains why Americans who read left-leaning media view the Proud Boys as a legitimate, existential threat to national civil order, while those who read right-leaning media believe the real immediate enemies of our nation are Antifa
  • Regardless of whether either of these groups represents a real public menace, the loss of any national consensus over what constitutes objective news means that Americans effectively talk past one another: they use the Proud Boys or Antifa as rhetorical barbs to smear their ideological opponents as extremists.
  • Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are, rather, “equipped with a program for social change.
  • Postman’s analysis of technology is prophetic and profound. He warned of the trivialising of our media, defined by “broken time and broken attention,” in which “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” He warned of “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity.”
  • does Postman offer any solutions to this seemingly uncontrollable technological juggernaut?
  • Postman’s suggestions regarding education are certainly relevant. He unequivocally condemned education that mimics entertainment, and urged a return to learning that is hierarchical, meaning that it first gives students a foundation of essential knowledge before teaching “critical thinking.”
  • Postman also argued that education must avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach in favor of complexity and the perplexing: the latter method elicits in the student a desire to make sense of what perplexes him.
  • Finally, Postman promoted education of vigorous exposition, logic, and rhetoric, all being necessary for citizenship
  • Another course of action is to understand what these media, by their very nature, do to us and to public discourse.
  • We must, as Postman exhorts us, “demystify the data” and dominate our technology, lest it dominate us. We must identify and resist how television, social media, and smartphones manipulate our emotions, infantilise us, and weaken our ability to rebuild what 2020 has ravaged.
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