We love the Internet. Except when we hate it. Every week, Jordan Valinsky bottles the angst of his Millennial generation and finds something to despise about the Web.
TIL that us Millennials are so totally screwed!
According to a strongly-worded new survey from Elon University, scientists fear that teens and twenty-something year-olds’ lives are suffering from their “always-on” lifestyle habits.
Full disclosure, Elon flat-out rejected me when I applied for colleges and caused me to hate things forever. I am totally not bitter about it.
See how my brain just jumped right on that? That’s because I’m a Millennial, and oooh, shiny. Scientists think our brains are being “rewired” because we’re becoming better at “connecting, collaborating, and working quickly.”
If by “working quickly” they mean tweeting, maintaining Pinterest boards of Instagram photos of puppies, and changing our Tumblr themes hourly, sounds about right.
In other words, we’re really good at doing mindless things better and faster compared to the olds. I love that a survey gave me validation for being good at the Internet. My boss never gives me any. (Hate you, you’re not even reading this! Seriously, what do you do?)
I also learned from the survey that we have a “thirst for instant gratification and quick fixes and a lack of patience and deep-thinking ability.” OMG, so judgy and yet such poor parallelism! Totally work on your sentence-construction skills, I’m sure you’ll get better with time, researchers!
Seriously, though, I didn’t read the survey. It required so much patience to get through the summary! And I didn’t take any Adderall today so that wasn’t going to happen anyway.
I’ll cop to a lack of “deep-thinking” abilities, though. Overrated! Critical analysis of other people’s viewpoints? So boring. My opinions are better anyway.
Anyway, I totally retained some of the stuff I skimmed off the summary!
Like this quote: “Memories are becoming hyperlinks to information triggered by keywords and URLs… as our brains are storing the keywords to get back to those memories and not the full memories themselves,” said Amber Case. I remember her! She hosted a TED Talk previously, according to a Google search I know I’ve done before..
So, our brains are now Internet service providers? If I want something, I’ll have to scream AOL keywords at it? Does the cost of my brain start at $30 for a RoadRunner Lite package and increase from there? And, most terrifyingly, what adverse affects will the Stop Online Privacy Act have on it? Can I sing to myself or is that copyright infringement now? I’m freaking out.
This is all very scary. See how dangerous “deep-thinking” can be? I’ll go back to grunting at my computer and stabbing my keyboard until my brain completes its rewiring.
Photo by zbrox
