Showing posts with label mind distortion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mind distortion. Show all posts

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Our parents are pointing their fingers in the wrong direction: Why video games and television doesn’t lower our attention span

Long title today. Ok, let’s get this started.

There are recent articles circulating on the Internet claiming that the reason for the diminishing attention span of people today is due to excessive video games and television.

In my own honest opinion, I believe that the statement above isn’t true. Yes, video games and television does contribute to the lower standards of attention span today, but they’re not the only ones that are responsible. The convenience of modern life today is most likely the main culprit in this growing problem.

Let’s compare how people get their news 100 years ago to how they do that today. A century ago, when people wanted to get their news, they would get out of their homes, go to the nearest store that sells newspapers, buy them, and take them home for them to read. Seeing that having to stand up and walk outside is quite a hassle, society invented convenience – instead of having customers go to the stores and buy newspapers, newspapers hired young children to deliver newspapers to those who subscribe to the service. When child labor was considered illegal, newspapers then resorted on news stands, a slower but less slave-labor’ey than using children for the job.

Right now, if you still wake up every morning, open your front door, and pick up that dirty slab of paper on your porch to read its contents, you’re most likely above 35 years of age. We just don’t do that anymore. It’s a hassle.

That’s just about it. Because technology moved towards speeding things up – making things easier, quicker and with less waiting times, we are forced to keep up with it, or at least encouraged to. Who needs snail mail when you’ve got email? Better yet, why use email when you could instantly contact anybody who’s online using the many instant messaging platforms available on the Internet?

We’ve got way too many stuff to make us lazy – televisions eliminate the need to go to an event and watch, phones and Internet communication eliminate the need to actually go to a friend’s house and have a chat, and we have the food delivery industry because most people are too fat to move their fatasses around just to get to the nearest McDonalds that they need to have people fetch food for them. People even came up and made the Segway, probably one of the those early spawns from hell that spells doom for humanity. It eliminates the need to do the one thing we have been doing since accomplishing bipedalism – walking. Walking. You’ve learned that when you were one to three years old. Why would you give up now?

Not trying to sound like a 60 year old deranged beardy man who constantly yells at children on the street to get off his “lawn”, but in my honest opinion, technology is really making us lazy. We’re even lazy to listen to people because we’re accustomed to just exchanging thoughts with each other through text messages and tweets that are less than 140 letters in length.

Did you read all of that? Good, you’re probably in your late thirties or more. If you just scrolled all the way down here and didn’t bother reading, get out of here, kthxbai.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Paranoia

It seems that I have read a whole shitload of fictional stories today, or just plain creepy stuff. I am sad to admit that I am very vulnerable to any work of fiction in literature that implies, well, shock and horror. I start to get extreme cases of paranoia where I start to imagine things over and over in my head. I start to get compulsive protective behavior. And most other shit someone high on crack would do.

That's why I keep away from plenty of spooky literature like fictional ghost stories yadda yadda. I'd enjoy a good horror film, especially a good horror game (hey, I play RE and L4D, isn't those games horror?). But I can't get a good horror book out of my head easily. When we're reading, our mind is doing its best to project the reading material's images into our imagination. That's why if one sentence of the recent thriller book speaks about a dark man with a chainsaw, you're going to see a dark man with a chainsaw in your imagination. And usually those thoughts will last for a few days up to a month.

I'm gonna have to reduce my time writing and doing any creative efforts. Don't want my audience to hear about the imaginary figures attacking my head when I read creepy shit.