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Et udvalg af (for mig) tankevækkende citater fra artiklen om The Great Cognitive Depression, og om hvordan især digital medier, apps og tjenester stjæler vore opmærksomhed og koncentration og evne til at fokusere på det vigtige…
“The Great Cognitive Depression is racing towards us and we don’t appear to be taking the early warning signs seriously and may not even notice before it’s too late.”
“When trillions of things not only collect billions of bits of information but also demand our attention and change our environments dynamically on the fly, our ability to think, make decisions and take actions may be on the verge of collapse.”
“Our attention, our cognition, is a very precious resource. We need it to study, to work, to run our daily lives, to take small and big and life-changing decisions. And it’s a limited resource. We can fool ourselves that we can multitask. That we have become a lot more productive as we track our Twitter feed and social media messages while we work, answer emails during conference calls. Except that we can’t and we don’t. We become less productive, not more.”
“Digital companies get all the benefits of capturing our attention, but the substantial damage they cause by destroying our cognition is not priced into their cost of doing business—it is borne by all of us, spread over the entire community and pushed out into the future.”
“There should be a warning telling us how much time we are wasting/investing on-line, and the price we are paying in terms of minutes and hours that we will waste away as we slowly try to refocus on work.”
“Something like “This product or environment consumes 20% of your daily ethical decision reserves per hour, and 60% of your attention reserves. It has known de-cognitive agents that have been shown to habituate reduced attentional habits.””
“None of this will be easy. We need better ways of measuring the de-cognition damage wreaked by digital technologies; we should think through the undesired side effects that any system of new taxes and incentives could create; we have to safeguard the benefits of hyper connectivity. But we need to act. Cognition is our most precious resource, and it is coming under attack just when we need it most. The sirens’ song is getting louder. We need to tie ourselves to the mast while we still can.”
