Social Cancer

So one of the things that stuck out to me the most this week that we talked about is how social media, and the internet and connectivity in general, is affecting our lives, how we think.

We are focusing on David Weinbergers idea of the three orders of order. The first is the order of physical things, like organizing plates, cups, and silverware in cupboards and drawers. The second order of order is systems of cataloging, such as the Dewy Decimal System, organizing information based on certain traits that they hold. The third order of order is the miscellaneous. Instead of separating information into different groups or sections, everything is just in a web, or pool together. Information is now identified by any quality or trait that it holds, and we decide how to search for it, or how it is organized, much like tags on a photo.

The third order of order is how the internet and social media is organized, just everything thrown together and we search for it based on whatever we remember about it, or categorize it anyway, and as many times, as we want. What this is doing is making it extremely efficient to find information. We don't need to be experts in the subject to find what we're looking for, and we don't need to even know exactly what we're looking for. We'll be able to find it, because everything is connected to everything. This has made it easy for anyone to search for anything. Instead of having to memorize or learn everything we want to know, we can just search for it. This is, in essence, moving our memory from the internal to the external. This can be extremely useful. But because we do not understand it completely yet, just like the properties of radioactive materials were not understood and overused in the 50's, we are overusing and abusing it. Instead of making neural connections in our brains by learning, memorizing, retaining, and applying information, we are moving those neural connections online. Thereby removing any cognitive benefit we had to learning to it. Now, I haven't studied this in depth, this is just basically speculation, or a hypothesis of mine at this point, but I do believe it. We are taking the challenge away, and by doing that, we cannot exercise our minds. "Use it or lose it" in practice.

It would be beneficial to us, I think (this is all just personal thought anyway), is to be raised, and trained formally in school even, by moving through the orders. We grow up as children learning the first order of order naturally when we interact with the world. We learn the second order of order in school, but that is even becoming less common with the introduction of technology in many classrooms. It is my opinion that education, both in the home and at school, should remain in the second order of order until much later in development, up till the later teen years, as they finish high school. Then they would be able to move on to being fully exposed and immersed in the third order of order.

Also we, as educated adults, should change a little bit when it comes to how much we depend on the third order of order. We spend so much time plugged in to the internet, our devices, and social media. This could be detrimental as a mass addiction to cigarettes, but this would be a social cancer. We should really take time to unplug. We should augment our lives with the internet and everything that uses it, but our lives shouldn't be consumed with it, shouldn't be it, the internet. We will find, I personally think, that if we continue at this rate, that we will see similar side affects as if we were all addicted to cigarettes, or if we were still using radioactive paint to make our watches glow in the dark. We have to calm down. We have to walk away sometimes. It will consume us, if it already hasn't. And I'm guilty of this too, I have to change as much as the next guy. It's a problem society as a whole is facing, and I don't think anyone really knows what to do to fix it yet.