Has the internet made people more stupid?

Like these stupid “trends” that go around.

eating spoonfuls of cinnamon and making a mess in mammys kitchen

eating laundry detergent pods

the newest one I’ve seen.. “sleepy chicken” involves boiling a chicken breast, in NyQuil and eating it.. for some reason?

i just can’t understand. Like people did stupid shite but is the problem how easily shared ones bad ideas are? You’d imagine that with access to plethoras of info these things wouldn’t get popular cos a simple Google search is bound to tell you eating chicken boiled in fcuking calpol is a pretty stupid idea.

What happened to so many people to make them so bloody stupid?

touts

I'm not sure. Let me look it up.

techman1

You don't have to think anymore because the device does all the computation for you, therefore you don;t have to study a map because the phone will tell you how to get to a location. You don't have to do maths because the phone will compute everything for you. You don't have to remember anything or know anything because you can look up everything on your phone.

The problem is that you are now totally dependant on your device and the network and can no longer function without it

growleaves

There's a nihilistic element to eating a laundry detergent pod, it's quasi-suicidal imo.

I think the internet has destroyed attention spans. Reading 800-page Russian novels much better for your attention span.

I've also heard it said that wifi can cause mild brain fog but I don't know if that's true.

Pauliedragon

A lot of people these days remind me of that movie Idiocracy.

cafflingwunts

It should be noted that platfoms like Tik-Tok were possibly only created as a means of weaponizing people against their own country. The Chinese government uses Tik-Tok as a means of psyops against American culture and it's younger generations. It must be working too because when I was young, no amount of peer-pressure could make me drink bleach.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118484590#Comment_118484590

Would you have been peer pressured into eating NyQuil chicken stew? 🤔

dxhound2005

Television is to blame as well.

Watching lots of TV ‘makes you stupid’, say researchers Universities of California and San Francisco

The study found people who watch the most TV are twice as likely to have poor mental functioning

cafflingwunts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118484602#Comment_118484602

If a hamster that farts electricity was serving it to me, I probably would, Jasiah Disgusting Spout.

aisling0800

No it doesn't, the internet empowers people. It makes dumb people dumber and smart/curious people smarter. Do you think that all these people posting these stupid TikTok trends or buying into ridiculous conspiracy theories wouldn't have done something similar before the existence of the web?

People gravitate towards content that aligns with their intelligence/personality.

StupidLikeAFox

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118484610#Comment_118484610

Does the TV make you stupid or are stupid people drawn to watching more TV though?

griffin100

It’s not that the internet had made people more stupid, it’s provided the stupid with a platform to demonstrate their stupidity to a wider audience. Before the internet they were limited to the other idiots in their social group, now they can inflict their stupidity on a lot more people. Case in point the comments section of the The Journal.

NSAman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118484639#Comment_118484639

The Journal that only allows comments on kite flying posts? No commentary on posts related to anything “worth” discussing.

i agree with the poster above who said it gives the stupid a massive platform to show stupidity, it also allows the smarter ones to gain more information more easily. If you are addicted to TikTok Facebook twitter or any of those platforms you are wasting time on a massive resource that allows incredible information to pass from your screen into your brain… but then again… cute cat videos are more important. 😀

It has made people fantastically more infantile.

The greatest test of intelligence imo,is the ability to take on new/different concepts

The internet provides endless oppurtunities for doing so,but also endless oppurtunities to have pre-existing preceptions re-enforced.

A great example of this,being the suprisingly controversial concept of asymptomatic spread of covid-19 (i err on side of caution and accept it)

growleaves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118485982#Comment_118485982

That sounds like Hans Ensynck's (intelligence researcher) concept of Openness/novelty.

Usually correlated with intelligence but I'm not sure it would be the greatest indicator of intelligence.

A super-intelligent person with low openness is plausible though I can't think of any famous examples to hand.

Freight bandit

Recommended watching for the dumb times we live in...to restore your sanity

https://youtu.be/vcCXhGWYBQw

Burt Renaults

uh i dunno lol

archer22

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118484590#Comment_118484590

And then there is the stupidity created by American propagandists...which makes stupid people think the Chinese government are out to get them.

Anesthetize

Not sure if it's made people more stupid in general, there's always been stupid people. It just makes them more exposed and gives them a wider platform.

Not just the internet, but smart phones.

Lazier. Problems with focus and attention span. Less memory retention.

So, Yes, definitely (myself included).

Melanchthon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118486491#Comment_118486491

This a million times this, smartphones have ruined my attention span. I need one for work with a decent size screen but have been thinking about getting one with the smallest screen possible to use in my time off

PsychoPete

I think it's just given stupid people a voice

Annasopra

Yes

Qanon

StupidLikeAFox

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118485982#Comment_118485982

 the suprisingly controversial concept of asymptomatic spread of covid-19

What?

Psychedelic Hedgehog

I've been online since 1994. Back then, your email and internet access was 99% controlled by your employer or college, so if you acted the maggot in any respect it'd result in suspension of privileges.

There's a reason Eternal September is a thing :)

Gregor Samsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118484572#Comment_118484572

Ironically, you just reminded a lot of people of that movie Idiocracy!

Esel

It makes stupid people more stupid. That's the plan anyway.

Sunny Disposition

Probably, but only slightly. It made attention spans shorter.

El_Duderino 09

Ah, there were always stupid people who did stupid things. People did stupid things for a laugh back in the olden days too.

People have always had difficulty in differentiating between good information and nonsense too. People believed all kinds not stupid things and old wives takes and urban legends backing the olden times. The Internet has helped spread bad ideas and false information as well as good information.

James o brien talks about the footballification of politics and I think he's dead right, but it also applies to other areas of of life too. He means that you don't have to follow football to have strong opinions because it's presented in bite size TV shows like match of the day, or you could follow the premiership by just reading the sport pages of a tabloid. Now you can just follow Twitter and then you understand politics and government.

The proliferation of conspiracy theories on the Internet is exactly this kind of thing in action.

The Internet hasn't made people more stupid, but it has allowed stupid ideas to spread really far and really wide and really quickly. People who can't tell good info from bad are more fcuked than ever before.

A percentage of people were always complete morons, the internet just connects them and gives them a visible platform so we can see them doing idiotic things.

The biggest positive and negative of the internet is that it brings like minded people together.

It can be hugely positive in many contexts, but it also can bring together the tiny % of complete morons who think the earth is flat or that drinking your own urine is good for you.

It’s also brought people together into all sorts of radicalised bubbles.

It’s likely to speed things up, drive social change, a lot of which is positive but it will also cause chaos and proliferation of crazy stuff on the fringes, some of which could be very weird and dangerous.

We've always had an element who are prone to falling into cults etc …

Strumms

the internet is the greatest accessible portal to education, information and entertainment in the history of mankind…

if you utilise it just to watch monkey porn…. It’s not going to make you more clever…

Wibbs

People have always been stupid or average or clever and taken over by fads. In the past there was a hula hoop fad, a yoyo fad, rubiks cube fad and so on. I remember as a little kid when the film Jaws came out and everyone I knew got rubber shark toys and posters on sharks and the telly had programmes about sharks like never before. That lasted about a year.

The interwebs has accelerated the speed of trends in coming and going. There is a lot more competing for our attention and our attention spans have dropped with all this stimulation. Companies have learned to weaponise this attention and other aspects of human nature to sell stuff.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118487826#Comment_118487826

That's certainly true but there's also been research showing the effect of phones and internet apps/social media, which has led to low/short attention spans, and the short term pleasure boosts coming from constantly flicking between screens. I saw a report that users of Ticktock, will view the first 20s of a vid, before moving on to the next, consuming a large amount of vids each day that they have little real interest in. Another report said that many users of social media, throughout their lifetime, will consume more online content, than the whole time they spend eating or drinking. All of this works towards changing the way people collate information.

I would say that the ease of accessing information means that people no longer develop the processes to acquire and store information effectively. After all, they can just go online and check for the meaning of something or get a quote from some website to answer most questions, rather than create the answers themselves.

A friend of mine was doing his thesis on the effects of media/phone devices and got a number of his friends (all with advanced degrees) to complete a series of tests and answer written questions. Most of the people involved used their phones/social media for their daily communication apart from verbal aspects. They have come to rely on the apps in their phones and such to spell-check, and correct the grammar, to the point where most of these academics, had numerous spelling and grammar mistakes in their written answers on paper. There were also problems with recall, and the use of material they were familiar with, but without their phones they couldn't remember the material accurately.

I do think with the emphasis on convenience, and apps that essentially do common activities for us, we are encouraging stupidity to set in. I don't see any likelihood of changing that.. but it's worth considering. For myself, I've started severely limiting my use of phone apps, especially those related to spelling/grammar because language use is so important to the type of work I do, but also to limit my time spent online or to force myself not to swipe between images or sites so quickly.

mcmoustache

Before the internet could be held in your pocket, you had to go out of your way to pick up stupid ideas. Not only that but when you wanted to express those stupid ideas, you had to do it in front of people you knew like your friends in a pub or a house and they would tell you quickly enough that you were being stupid unless everyone was stoned. What's more, the words "bit of an eejit" might start to be uttered after your name when people think you're not around.

Now, you don't need to try out your stupid ideas in front of real people. You can just go to online communities who will validate any stupid idea you like. There's no more of that stigma that comes from saying stupid shíte in front of your peers. Other stupid people from those communities will make you feel smart.

Don't get me wrong, people have always been stupid but in the real world, there are some imperfect self-correcting social mechanisms that help to reduce the more extreme and overt stupidity. On social media it's nearly the opposite.

AckwelFoley

The Internet hasn't made people stupid, but what it has done is it has brought every village idiot together from the thousands of villages and now you have gathering of idiots. Couple that with the bucket loads of misinformation, and now you have a movement. Stupid peoples threshold of what makes sence is almost infantile

The smartest people I know don't use social media at all. So you have social media filled with teens that find their self worth measured off likes and subscribers and their parents organising a protest in Dublin in Saturday week to demand a revolution

Fallout2022

I think so and I avoid ever using it.

Greyfox

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118492020#Comment_118492020

Life would be pretty rubbish without the Internet. The Internet can make you much more intelligent if you use it wisely, it's crammed full of wisdom. Its just unfortunate that too many people don't know how to distinguish been wise words and garbage.

El_Duderino 09

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118496246#Comment_118496246

That's essentially it. The difference between good information and bad is the key. There are loads of businesses set up to sell exciting information, whether it's good or bad info is an afterthought. There's also bias to consider. They can sell you things you're predisposed to already agree with or get cross about

The people aren't more or less intelligent, but they can become deeply misinformed and convinced of their being super informed - do your research is the catchphrase of the conspiracy theorist. These people don't know that Facebook isn't research.

beachhead

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118484590#Comment_118484590

Remove your brain and join tiktok

beachhead

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118484639#Comment_118484639

agreed

cafflingwunts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118486257#Comment_118486257

You really have no grounds to be calling anybody stupid, Archer.

Tik-Tok is owned/maintained and controlled by ByteDance. ByteDance is founded by Zhang Yiming. US DOJ has previously claimed he was actually the unofficial spokesperson or ''mouth-piece'' of the Chinese Communist Party in business circles.

I don't really think people gradually got so dumb to the point that they come up with ideas to hurt themselves on camera for views without something pushing them in that direction. ByteDance's first initial project was a media tool for China called ''Toutiao'' – This is from Wikipedia; Toutiao is one of China's largest mobile platforms of content creation, aggregation and distribution underpinned by machine learning techniques [...] 90% of Toutiao users are under 30 years old.

To me, maybe I'm tapped, but that reads like it was the beta version of a tool being created to influence and shape opinions remotely of people you want to control. They use Toutiao to keep their citizens awash in pro-China propaganda and they use Tik-Tok to slowly degrade the younger generations of every other country into firmly believing they're not worth their own lives. Am I really so wrong in saying that the youth of today place no value on life?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118551044#Comment_118551044

tiktok is 110% Chinese spyware & the idiots are the ones who think otherwise.

that’s the end of it.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118486257#Comment_118486257

Load of bollocks

Every patriot knows you need arms in case the King of England shows up in the morning demanding his land back

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118552414#Comment_118552414

Without this gun the king of England could march in here anytime he wanted and start pushing you around!

Is that what you want Lisa? Huh? Huh??

El_Duderino 09

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118551044#Comment_118551044

Am I really so wrong in saying that the youth of today place no value on life?

Yes. Like, how did you reach that conclusion? It seems to have absolutely nothing to do with any of the information in the post and doesn't natch up with my experience of young people. Do the young people you know really place no value on life?

No value? What would that even mean?

Crocodile Booze

It's made gullible people believe they are intelligent, because they are now "researchers", and know better than lifelong experts in every field.

For example, lots of fools are now suddenly expert epidemiologists, as seen on the covid forum on this very site.

whisky_galore

People have always been stupid, the net simply gives them a stage to display their stupidity to all.

We did dickhead things as kids but they aren't posted for all to see for all time.

Dempo1

In relation to the Thread Question

No Generally , but Social media Has in so many and disturbing ways 🙄

kowloon

I remember when I had to loan/buy a book on a topic rather than stick a keyword into Google. The effort you had to go to to learn something made it stick. Even a quick search in a reference involved slowly going through an index and finding the right page. A glacial process compared to any search engine.

My short term memory has gone to the dogs anyway, but I think easy access to information has hastened the decline. My spelling held up for longer, but now I'm seeing red underlines more and more. The computer can automatically fix them for me, so I don't learn to correct them.

It's not all bad; I've seen kids with more knowledge on a topic than anyone could have attained 30 years ago. They soak up information like a sponge. So while they could waste all that curiosity on Tiktok and the likes, it could also end up creating the next great mathematician, novelist or entrepreneur. You won't see much of that expert-level knowledge and focus on display on social media, it's too niche to compete with the mass of dumb tide pod eating videos, but it's there.

ILoveYourVibes

I WAS ALWAYS STUPID 🙂