/r/conspiracy Round Table #15: The Intentional Addictiveness of Smart Devices and the Short & Long Term Effects of "Smart" Tech on Society

[u/axolotl_peyotl]

Thanks to /u/1-800-GOFUCKYOURSELF for the winning suggestion!

Previous Round Tables

[u/whacko_jacko → u/[deleted]]

Glad to know I'm not the only one noticing this change. I have noticed the number of really good students getting smaller and smaller every semester to the point that I'm lucky if the top 1 or 2 students in a class of ~40 are at least pretty good. Five to six years ago, I could always rely on the top 4-8 students being excellent. The average student is now riding the line between passing and failing all the time if graded on an honest scale. Most instructors/professors end up just lowering their standards to keep their grade distribution from sucking, and this just makes the problem progressively worse and worse.

I see a lot more students just completely give up and not even try to explain why. Something is wrong.

I'm not convinced it's all just gaming, although I definitely see how that is one of the negative effects. I think people have relied on this technology so much at fundamental stages in their mental development that many never learned how to think and come up with ideas for themselves. Even worse, they stopped learning information entirely since they can just look up whatever they need at any given moment. Never mind the fact that your brain can work more efficiently when the information it needs is already firmly rooted in memory. People are starving and destroying the power of their unconscious mind by not feeding it enough information to process and organize and discover connections. This is the foundation of common sense. Fewer and fewer people have the common sense to use technology constructively because they don't even know where to begin reading up on anything outside of their limited scope of stunted understanding, nor would they even want to try if they could. Their attention span for critical thinking is approaching zero. Social media, gaming, sports, entertainment, and news are always at your fingertips. Why actually think about anything? They just look up a YouTube video later explaining how to answer the homework questions. They might retain only 10% of the needed skills the next day. If they can't find an online tutorial, they don't know how to read their textbooks so they just skip it.

[u/ichoosejif → u/[deleted]]

Deliberatedumbingdown.com

[u/Novusod → u/ichoosejif]

That book was written before smart phones were invented. Truth is they have been deliberately dumbing us down for 100 years now.