The Speed With Which We Post And Consume Information Online Is Making Us Dumber

Slowing down makes you smarter (and separates you from the masses)

Hello out there - in a rushed world,

Here comes your weekly permission slip to Un-rush and Slow Down.

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Interesting INSIGHTS I found

Curated articles/links on the topic of slowing down and living better.

After the article in this post, paid subscribers will find a brief description and links to the following stories:

MINDSET SHIFT

• I am Gen X and just read that we are the forgotten generation

LIFESTYLE WITH AWARENESS

• Testing a happiness challenge based on scientific evidence

SLOW ESCAPES

• A 19^th century manor in a valley outside of Porto

• Breathe on Mallorca

The Speed With Which We Post And Consume Information Online Is Making Us Dumber

Slowing down makes you smarter (and separates you from the masses)

The faster we push out information on online platforms and the more we read the better informed we are, right?

A post on LinkedIn reminded me of yet another reason why the power of slow has its place in our oversaturated online media craziness.

The number of likes (50k) and shares (2k) and happy comments (1.7k) on a post I saw on LinkedIn the other day was insane. The post included a picture of Clint Eastwood with a quote on aging and the values in our lives. Except – these were not Eastwood’s words and the photograph of him was “taken from the internet” (we can just do that, right?) without any photo credit, even though it was a picture by a well-known photographer.

This is just a reminder of how careless we have become because we are under constant pressure to post and consume so much that we don’t pay attention anymore to sources, value, quality, or copy rights. Slowing down is a good remedy for being more attentive.

Negligence, superficiality, little sense of responsibility, and being careless has become the new normal. This is not about this one silly post. Who cares? It’s about a general trend we can observe that because of the speed, hurry, and pressure we are losing track of our values, principles and basic responsibilities. Our brain just jumps, and swipes, and glances without noticing. Without paying attention.

Getting dumber

Without blinking or thinking, people like and share and comment.

The speed-feeding diminishes our capability to reflect, to question, to evaluate, to judge, and to be patient and dig deeper. This results in lower quality, less care, and more crap.

Looking at the era of digital photography, you can draw some parallels. The well-known Italian photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin, 94, and still photographing, said about digital photography that it’s wonderful to have the invention of digital photography as it gave so many people access to photography. The problem is that it gave too many people access to photography, and 85% of the photos out there are crap.

Our brain’s pre-frontal section is responsible for analyzing tasks, prioritizing them, and assigning our mental resources to them. When we overload it with too much information and input, or make it switch focus too quickly, it simply slows down. The Journal of Experimental Psychology reported that students who were distracted while working on complicated math problems took 40 percent longer to solve them.

When we rush through posts on the various social media platforms without thinking, without being critical, without questioning, all of those things become a distraction that overwhelms us. Too quickly and hectically we react to posts, for example to the wise words from a celebrity that contains a message that speaks to us. We only glance over it, just read a few lines, those resonate, further context doesn’t matter and click like, share the link and perhaps comment on it. We feel forced to look, read, react, and post in a quick and superficial way.

It has become a habit. And a normality. Which doesn’t mean you have to do it too.

You feel forced. But you can choose

We can’t slow down the output, but we can slow down the way how we interact with it.

Too many Social media and networking platforms invite us to post too much stuff. The amount of Social media channels and feeds we are confronted with, voluntarily or not voluntarily, is getting insane, ridiculous and out of control. Some people love getting lost in it, others hate getting lost in it, and again others feel pressured to look at it. And then there is the I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-those-platforms camp, and these are probably the healthiest of us.

We can choose wisely, cut out the noise and focus on a few sources and platforms. Selecting what we consume, or post, slows us down and opens up brain-bandwidth to reflect on what we take in, to be more critical and to better understand the context. That’s a brave step to separate yourself from the crowd by becoming more aware of the benefits of not being part of the superficial followers.

Slowing down makes you smarter

Our brains work better when we are not rushing all the time.

Slowing down makes you smarter, byte-sized interactions make you dumber. Our perpetual, quick, superficial interactions are not only harm to your concentration, focus, or productivity, but they are actually hurting your intelligence.

Researchers already believe that slowing down can make us smarter – so, you can believe it too. Research on slowing down through meditation, for example, showed that structural changes occurred in the brains of participants who had spent just 30 minutes a day for eight weeks quietly meditating. The functioning of the brain parts that are responsible for learning and memory increased, and the sections that are in charge of anxiety and stress decreased.

Here are a few questions to help you along the way