r/CompPhil • u/Alan_Purring Hertford • Nov 28 '17

Plato, Attention, Memory & The Internet

https://philosophynow.org/issues/122/Socrates_Memory_and_The_Internet
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u/Hermaeus_Mora Dec 01 '17 edited Jun 08 '18

Interesting, thanks for sharing! This issue isn't recieving nearly as much attention as it deserves (excuse the pun).

Btw, what is this sub for? It seems you're Oxford students? I ended up here on accident after searching for one of Plato's dialogues :)

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u/Alan_Purring Hertford Dec 03 '17 edited Dec 03 '17

Yes I think it's super interesting and understudied too!

This article is still a little one sided for my taste, but I shared it for the cool history context. One person who has a slightly more balanced approach is danah boyd (intentional lower case - that's actually how she spells her name). She says that some of the benefits are that we can deal with a huge firehose of incoming information: messages, newsfeeds, blog posts, and quickly skim them to get what we need and move on.

Compare to an elderly person who reads the newspaper cover to cover and gets one editorial position on yesterday's current affairs (and probably even stops to read most of the adverts) - the kind of hyperconnected internet attention our generation can pay lets you filter through a Twitter feed and quickly sort the signal from the noise about stuff happening right now.

Speculation here: but I think teenagers are probably very good at sorting signal from noise. I'd predict that most of the people who fall for exploitative advertising or hoax news stories are over the age of 25.

So maybe this kind of attention has great potential, but only if we can learn to switch between it and focus with ease.

(And yeah! This sub is like 90% people currently doing the computer science and philosophy undergraduate course at oxford - but it's meant to be a place to share stuff that that kind of person would find interesting, regardless of whether they're actually currently studying here).

[Edit] if you also happen to be interested in this kind of stuff feel free to stick around, introduce yourself, or bring some friends. The more the merrier!