~The Rate of Change... for better or for worse~ Take a step outside of yourself and think about the time when there was no social media, no twitter, no Facebook... not even MSN or Myspace... It feels like these things have been around forever right? The perspective of change around is going at a high rate of speed and it seems like every year, new things begin to pop up that you couldnt even dream of. There has been an incredible fast rate of change over the past decade or so, such as the social media and such, but lets go back... way back... Anthropologists have found evidence of human beings dating back 250 thousand years... They have found burial grounds, cave drawings, complicated language acquisitions from human beings that date back roughly 250 thousand years. In 8000 B.C.E... the first wheel was invented by man... If you do the math, human beings were on this planet for 240 thousand years before someone figured out how to make a wheel... Stunning right? That is the rate of change we used to go through. The next major change was the invention of the plow. The reason why this was such a major change was that human beings no longer had to be hunter gatherers... They can stay in one area and grow their food in one area, which gave rise to the great civilizations... By the way, the plow was invented in 5000 B.C.E... It took them another 3 thousand years to go from a wheel... to a plow, but nonetheless, the rate of change was speeding up. Then it took man another 5500 years before the printing press was invented. The printing press was 1430... The reason why this was such a huge change was because people can now produce mass information in record time. They no longer had to have scribes handwriting each book or tablet. They now can give books away by the hundreds with record time. Then came the telephone 430 years later by Alexander Graham Bell in 1870. Then came the cell phone in 1970... Then the most recent jump was the smart phone in 2007... 5 years ago... If you want to see the rate of change in action, look around and see how many people have smartphones since its inception 5 years ago... it is stunning the rate of change is. Why has this fast rate of change become even faster over time? Well about 35 years ago, we went from an analog system to a digital system(Binary System). Virtually overnight, things zoomed up by a factor of a thousand. All of the sudden we had the TI Calculators. Remember those? We no longer had to do it by hand. The calculator changed everything when it came to doing complicated algebra, calculus, statistics, functions all that good stuff. Tape decks into VHS... VHS to CDs... Email to social networking... Video games! I swear within the next 20 years... we will be able to experience ourselves within the video game. Think about it... Why make money in the real world when you can create mass chaos in Grand Theft Auto 5 and be a millionaire within that game. Instead of living in the conscience world, wrap your unconscious mind around playing inside the Call of Duty games... No controller, no television. You are literally on a map with a SCAR-LH in your hands. That is going to be amazing and it will not surprise me if they figure it out down the line. However, we have gone through the rate of change so fast that it made me stop and wonder... Has it changed us? It has... here is a great example. Lets go back to the digital calculator. It changed us all in a very subtle way. So I got a challenge for you. Invent a 6 digit number... 781,459... divide that number by 21... LONG HAND. #1, see if you can still do it...And #2, see how long it takes you to do it. We long ago abandoned the process of long hand. We have no turned it over to the machines. We can plug in any number and add, subtract, multiply, and divide the number and it will give us an answer immediately. Another huge change is that we can conveniently get things done in record time because of the internet. One time I had a term paper that was due in 4 weeks... I got it done in 4 hours. Google, as for many search engines, have created a way to make our process of getting things done even simpler. I remember having to do a term paper in junior college where we werent allowed to use the internet. I literally had to go outside my room, go to UNMC and search for my sources in a library. Ill tell you what... after having so much convenience with the internet, that was tough to do. I had to search for my sources and if the book was gone then I was shit out of luck and had to start over again. It was hell... Encyclopedia Britannica in 2012 said that they are no longer printing them out... That is insane! No more encyclopedias! Now having to go backwards in time to do a term paper the hard way, made me respect how the old times use to be. Dont get me wrong, we are just full of conveniences now. We carry a computer in our pockets for Christ sake... The reason why I respect it is because here is what is being subtracted from our thinking process... THE ACTUAL PROCESS! The processer of a computer gives us the answer a thousand times faster than the human brain. We are beginning to think, talk, and act like computers... People always sayI am thinking about 5 things at once. I have taken class on psychology and I have to tell you that is impossible. Your brain can only harness one thought process at a time. You can do 5 things at once, but your brain is incapable of doing so. People talk like computers... LOL, BRB, TTYL, SSDD There was an article that I read and it stated Is social networking making us lonely? It has because it is so scatterbrained... Speaking intimately to a person on a keyboard has literally driven us to be lonely because we dont have human contact anymore. Human contact has been with us since weve been born... Why does the mother hold the child after he/she has been born? To create intimate human contact that bonds the 2. Because of social media, human contact has been subtracted from our state of being. Why do relationships often fail more frequently? Because we are always connected... but there is no intimate contact. It is one thing to be in a long distance relationship, but it is another when you can talk freely to someone on a network, but then when it comes face to face... it becomes awkward. Another thing that has changed us is our focus. Like I said before, we have become more like computers. Computers can do 6000 things at once while we can only think of one thing. We try to think of many different things at once but what it does is that it separates us from our goals. I sit here studying for a huge test and Ill i can think of is work, me and my girlfriend fighting, that jackass that cut me off earlier... It subtracts our thought process into these little pockets of issues that keep us from focusing. All of this is a byproduct of the times we live in. It is hard to believe what the times are going to be like in the future... Maybe we need to unlearn what we have learned and take a step back. We are on an exponential curve that will never hit 0... but for us human beings, we will hit 0 before anything else.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 07:01:23 +0000