Is thinking now obsolete?

You can think, as long as your thinking is aligned with either the left or the right herds. And do not dare to express thoughts that are not derived from popular public opinion.

Fact is, whether you believe it or not, the vast majority of you are incapable of thinking for yourselves. You are members of a pack or herd of likeminded individuals. You identify yourself with one group or another and adopt their thinking and mindset.

Which is why we are doomed.

I don't identify with any group. I don't agree with most if not all 'popular opinions' out there. The whole left vs right dichotomy is nothing more than an illusion of choice and gives people safe haven to not think for themselves.

Good, denial is a good first step toward understanding how and why YOU think the way you do.

Believe it or not, the power of group influence on a person is extremely easy to see by simply reading their thoughts posted online, or expressed verbally.

Sol, only a very small number of humans are immune to these earthy influences... Are you saying you are one of them?

Nicholas Carr wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine that perhaps best summarizes what the Internet is doing to its users: “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore.

Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

“I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer.

Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’ reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.”

“For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind…And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (emphasis ours).

The last sentence is possibly the best analogy to explain how people read online. Mr. Carr goes on to explain that “the result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

He also quotes playwright Richard Foreman, who said, “We are the pancake people…spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information access by the mere touch of a button.”

[link to realtruth.org]

The Impact