2025-03-14
What if your mind - and mine too - is like a box which can fill at any given point of time, at most, one thousand facts in it. It is a box, it has a limit on how much it can store. It is restricted by the space in it. Such that if you learn five new facts, your brain must dispose five older ones to make space for the new five facts. But ever since we were born our senses are feeding our brain with all sorts of information. As a result, every passing moment we are storing and discarding plenty information simultaneously. Now keeping the facts as they are, let me ask you, if you knew about this 'limited facts capability' of brain, would you still be engaging in deliberately collecting less important information? I am asking this because I am doing this all the time when I open a social media app.
You might rightly say that it's not actually how our brain works. You may be right, I have no study to back it up. However, common sense suggests that reality must not be far from the fact that we can store facts only to an extent in our brain. Moreover, if you still wish to criticize, this idea is not a creation of my mind, I merely copy pasta it from Sherlock Holmes.
We would surely come back to this question again. For now, let me share why I came up with this question at all. Do you remember those days when major chunk of our internet experience was to deliberately search a particular term on google and get the information we asked for? Like we would go on internet with a question or search query in mind, get the information and come back. And even the peculiarity of that activity is that you will only get the results which are related to your search query. The homepage of google.com will give you no other information but a search box which will take you to that corner of the internet you searched for.
Of course this is something which you still can replicate on google: Decide exactly what information you would want to consume. However, google is not anymore the only place where we generally spend our time on - Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit etc. are the virtual places we also usually spend our time on. As you may already know that the bombardment of information which we get from these apps is the kind of information which we don't have much control on. For instance, lets say its evening time, you have yet to decide what to eat for dinner, and out of habit you open twitter for no particular reason, you land on the 'for you' page on the app. All of a sudden, 5 minutes down, you find your mind caught up in the latest controversy going on between two individuals and by this time you have read as many posts that now it is next to impossible not to take a side. Even though you didn't deliberately decided to get to know about this controversy. Nor did you put any keyword in the search box related to those people, but you now know lot of useless information about two groups fighting on internet for a topic which has no real life implication on you. But you have given enough attention to them that it has now taken over your mind. And what were you thinking about before opening the app? dinner? oops! 5 min twitter experience led to 30 min voyage for the lookout of new and hot information. Now you have no other option but to eat whatever is left in the fridge or just go out to some fast food chain - Where you will indulge into the consumption of the same controversy while your order gets prepared. Sounds like an extreme case? Well I am guilty of having this once. Or maybe even more times, I can't recall at this point. Scary!
Yes, I am not the first one to say these things. We all are aware about this already. At this point this phenomenon is part of almost all of our daily lives. We do get lot of unintended uninformative information. This fact alone might make us start think ill about these apps. But these apps are not entirely evil. I mean yes they do bombard us with lot of noise on 'for you' pages, but similar to 'for you' there is also this page called 'subscribed to' or 'from people you follow' where at least you know that you will only be getting information from the people you intentionally clicked on the follow button. Even though you don't have much control on what your following may post but you have a rough idea what it may be. While 'for you' will bombard you with whatever is trending currently (or something related to your previous engagement or some more stimulating and hot content).
Considering that, despite us knowing the destructive impact of such suggestive hot topics on our thinking, our rationale still fails us to deter us from opening 'for you' pages every time we get even minimally bored. What I have seen from my observations is that we generally tend to spend more time on 'for you' pages on Instagram and Twitter comparatively to the page which only gives feed from your following. Maybe because our rationale creates that facade of "oh by using these apps I am learning so much" - yeah lot of useless information. That makes me remind the quote that our mind is good at fabricating all the reasons to do the things which we want to do.
The reason behind spending so much time on 'for you' page might be that what we have on our 'followed page' is no more our actual interest. That we have have lost interest in the things which we have followed. Or it could be just that we are not at all opening these apps to get information. Rather to use these apps as time filler - stimulus giving - experience apps. It seems quite clear that in a situation where we are looking just to have an stimulus providing experience for the 5 min break on work, we couldn't care less about information or feeds from the accounts we follow. Au contrary, more spicy post means more engagement from our side.
But it can't be true for all the situations. Sometimes we do feel that the time spent on these apps are not wasted as we end up learning so many facts: A post about Trump's latest comments on Ukraine. Or how a human will die if he is left in space without any equipment for 5 minutes and so on. This is indeed some information. But are they really informative?
Now coming back to the question I had put in the start: If our minds can be filled with only a finite number of facts. And filling new facts requires getting rid of older ones. Despite this situation why do we continue to stack piles after piles of useless information by getting rid of some important facts? Or maybe if that is not how it works, then at least this mindless scrolling for sure takes our attention to the matters which are not related to our lives. Here I am not bashing social media, but only the aspect where unintended information takes our attention. If I am getting content from the people I follow, it would still seem fine. But for now, the 'for you' page has taken over my time. And I believe that I am not the only one who is battling this time-draining activity.
On the other hand the enemy marches towards you with relentless belligerence. There it comes glittering with its compact screen. With only minimal requirement to be activated. Always ready to please you with its package of stimulus bundled with useless information. Conquering that and moving to a more fulfilling option such as maybe reading a book - or conversation with other humans - will test your strength and belief in god. But rationality and comfort alone can't be relied upon to fight this enemy of rat in size, but mammoth in its strength. Where have the rationality and comfort have taken us if not on 'for you' page?