Living threat | Digital
amnesia is a phenomenon in which human knowledge gets lost because of our
dependency on technology. And, smartphones are getting us there at a breakneck
speed
In today’s age, there
should be no reason for you not to know about anything under the sun.
Google has changed the way
we gather information and it has vastly reduced the need for physical books and
libraries. The same can be said about physical communication whose face changed
dramatically with the advent of Facebook. While everyone thought online
shopping would simply be an alternative to physical shopping, it is now on the
verge of being deemed the only way to shop.
The list goes on, and the
digital versions of our once entirely physical lives is stored in a remarkable
device called the ‘smart phone’. The only problem is, we’ve transferred most of
our brain’s memory responsibilities over to our phones and that’s worth
worrying about.
Mr. Altaf Halde, Managing
Director - South Asia, Kaspersky Lab said, “Digital amnesia should not be taken
lightly. Yes, a smart phone has become almost necessity for anyone who lives in
today’s society and it’s an essential professional and personal tool for
communication.
However, it is very
important to limit ones dependency on it primarily because of its addictive
properties. The mind is a muscle and it if it’s not used for the reasons it was
made, it will become lazy.”
Kaspersky Lab conducted a
research between 23/06/2015 and 02/07/2015 with a total of 1007 adults in
India, that illustrates some truly shocking facts about the reliance on
smart-phones amongst the Indian population. Now, although 7 out of 10 people
could recall their partner’s/spouse’s phone numbers without any help from their
phones, only 2 out of 10 could recall their child’s school’s contact number.
The trend of smart phone
dependency seems to decrease as the age of the test group increased. That’s
because smart phones have not been around for long enough to influence a 55
year old man/woman the same way it’s influencing a teenager. It also highlights
the future for Indians, because reliance on smart phones is only going to get
more and more severe.
Furthermore, 50% of the
survey group treats the internet as an extension of their brain, and since 73%
of them use their smart phones to connect to the internet, you can see how
misplacing a phone can be a cause for serious concern amongst most Indians.
Memory is first to get effected and since digital communication has become
incredibly high with websites like Linkedin and Twitter, our minds can’t
possibly store so much of information without some help.
It seems very clear that
this is not just a topic of reliance but rather something more severe, an
addiction. It’s an addiction to the digital world that has managed to engulf us
so strongly, that our own minds are beginning to work more like Google and less
like a human being. Almost 50% of Indians aren’t interested in remembering
facts as much as they are interested in remembering the source for the facts
(i.e. Google). The same can be said about the camera on a smart phone, that is
slowly beginning to do more work than our own eyes, when it comes to storing
human experiences.
It has reached a point
where your own smart phone has applications that can help the user take some
time off from the digital world. It is said that a week away from the Internet
and smart phones is all your body needs to tune back into the frequencies of
nature, sort of like a ‘digital detox’. Back in the 90s, there was no need for
this kind of rehabilitation and unfortunately, as we go further into the
future, a week of detox will not be sufficient.
Source | Daily News Analysis | 31 August 2015
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