I don't mean food. I mean content.
TV. Music. Internet.
What does a typical day consist of in your world?
I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher the other day and he made a great point in which I'd never considered. I can go to Yahoo! right now and pull up my home page. If you went to Yahoo! at the same exact time, what comes up on your screen is going to be different than what comes up on mine.
Your computer personalizes what you see based on the sites that you visit. Also, a lot of sites allow you to customize what you see. Mix in the fact that newspapers are dying a slow death and you're left with millions of people in this country getting random information. This is probably why so many people haven't heard of certain news stories when you mention it to them. It probably wasn't on their customized feed.
Let's look at how this affects young people. The average college student probably doesn't read the newspaper or watch local news. When you consider their electronic gadget options then more than likely their homepage consists of Vine videos, Facebook status updates, tweets and entertainment news (oxymoron).
It's safe to say that a lot of young people in this country go days or even weeks without seeing a news story. Instead their mind is constantly consuming only what they wish to view which is normally related to entertainment or social networking. With days upon days of reality show fight clips, viral videos and Instagram Likes a person's brain essentially dumbs itself down (or never grows).
How can a person possibly expect to be a part of the outside world if they don't even live in it?
If you constantly consume garbage then that is what will constantly come out of your mouth when you speak. It's also going to be all that you know and understand and you will not fit into some places in society because of it. A person doesn't read Spanish and speak French. That's not how your mind works. What you put into it is all that you can get out of it.
There has to be a balance. You have to get some good to offset the bad. I love the NFL, but I have enough diversity in my life to prevent it from being all that I know. If I go to a party, I don't have to sit around and wait for someone to bring up football just to join the discussion. As you can see from my blog, I have the ability to discuss almost anything.
If you don't have balance then customizing your homepage or personalizing your phone can pretty much make you stupid. If it's only garbage going in, then you can rest assure that it will only be garbage coming out.
Have you ever met a person who knows absolutely nothing about anything important?
No comments:
Post a Comment