Digitization

A short ramble about digitization

I've recently been thinking about digitization and how social media and technology is affecting our minds and how we spend our daily lives. There's a lot of positivity with this technology, but our animalistic brains cannot handle the overflow that it produces...

This technology creates information we have no time to process our thoughts it's simply moving on to the next thing to the next and next never really getting a break and that is probably leading to a lot of mental instabilities in our current society how our brains are constantly fed

stuff without time to sort things in and how we ourselves don't have time to think about the stuff we're taking, process it, digest it. It's too easy to just let automatically fed information dictate our opinions, instead of taking the time, sitting down, and pondering for ourselves.

Because that's also part of human nature to stick to the herd. It's safer to stick with what has a lot of views, a lot of supportive comments, as that's a big herd. And you feel safe in that opinion, whilst actually discovering yourself, and your lived experience… how you see the world, that takes more effort and more thought behind it, and especially it takes time, most of our society today don't like to use. Instead, they like to use it for short-term gratification.

I've been recently... why I'm thinking about this subject is purely because I've been thinking about how would one save our future generation because we who are adults over the age of 18 and don't really have a parent or someone that can dictate to us what to do anymore, we might already be lost cause in that aspect unless somebody has personal growth realized the addiction.

So how would we nip the bud so to say in the problem of digitalization?

I had a thought about maybe when you're in school you have a class of basically meditation where you get to be in complete silence with your own thoughts, maybe not even being in a room if the school permits it like in a Swedish school it would probably be more possible that the whole class goes on a walk and nobody is allowed to talk. Basically, take it in nature and you can have the time for your own thoughts.

And also something that would help is… And that's on the parents' shoulders to not raise iPad kids. Put more time into your child, Give them attention and closeness, and not “throw” your iPad at the child and go away and do your own thing.

because that will leave the child socially inept and hardwiring the brain to seek quick gratification, as our media online is currently pumping out.

For the adult generation, how one would fix the problems is a bit harder as...

the same as sugar really, it's the most addictive substance we currently have in our society

It's the availability and downplaying of the addictive aspect of a phone. Like sugar is probably what needs to be changed.

It doesn't matter how much we tell people to change… and continue telling them how dangerous the addiction is if the ones preaching don't live what they preach to set an example for the younger generation there will be no way that change occurs because how is one supposed to change if the one telling us to change is not changing themselves. It’s basic why one wouldn't listen to that.

Another thing would probably be

some sort of algorithm change to social media, to not promote short form content.

And yes, it will maybe touch on freedom of speech to forcefully change that, but… One can seek out that content while the algorithm sticks it in your face so if we change that It might become better, but that's the thing we never know really what will happen with a change.

unless it's done and we can see how human nature adapts to the change, because like a river if you try to restrict it it will find another way.

Recently myself, I've been trying to cut down on shorts because recently I spent the whole day after work just looking at shorts, and when I realized it... Two hours had passed and I started to self-reflect how bad it had really become. I started going through my phones trying to find apps and other social media I could delete. Even dating apps, that currently so toxic to the minds, and self-esteem of many people on both sides.

What I hope for the future is that people find beauty in what's outside, instead of closing themselves inside...

And I also hope that future architecture will create that wonder instead of four-sided boxes that inspire nobody and just creates depression while looking at it. There is no aesthetic, no history, no culture, in the modern architecture, it has basically the same setup as the digital world I would say.

Everywhere looks the same, the only change is the language spoken. Otherwise, all the big social media, the UI of those, UX, design is basically the same. And that's the same with modern architecture that they all look the same. You don't know which city you are in if you look at the architecture of the modern era.

Now I really just... Gone off the beaten path with my thoughts currently, talking about architecture instead of digitalization.

But I feel like all these subjects of the modern era are in some ways interconnected with each other, and I think it's the merchant class, and now I just mean the businesses, not a dog whistle from the past. I just mean the business owners, the rich. The merchant class in that context. I believe that they are the ones, who want a similar formula all over the world so there's no difference, so their business can be optimized to work everywhere. And in the end, I feel like that's a machine, like a machine learning AI. it might not even be one person's idea to do that.

But it's like a hive mind that each separate action of people leads up to that

conclusion without the individual realizing what they have done.

And I find it interesting how people with separate goals, separate values, when they get put in a corporate architecture, they might work towards goals they don't even realize they're working towards themselves. Even the CEO might not even realize what the outcome is.

Like the famous machine learning or AI thought experiment, the stamp collector. That if you give an AI a bit of money and say to collect stamps, to maximize the stamp collection, it will end up investing in forestry and paper factories and other stuff. until it will use all the trees on earth to create postcard stamps. Because that's what it's optimizing for, It doesn't know that it's bad to cut down all the trees on earth, it's just doing it to maximize the amount of stamps.

I hope… That the future doesn't go down a similar path to that.

(Used AI transcription, Audio to text)