Concentration Campaign

Welcome, everyone. I have a challenge for you now. Let’s see if you can successfully complete that challenge by reading this one till the end. Otherwise, you can declare yourself as a victim of the concentration campaign run by the social media giants on your minds.

Let me tell you about an incident that compelled me to write this. I was walking down a road I’m fond of, just for a casual morning walk. I saw a few people staring down at their phones and walking, unaware of the world around them. I felt weird because when I would do the same, these same elders would come up to me and give a free advice on how not to get addicted to the phone and live life in front of us.

I thought that hypocrites are being manufactured in our society these days, it seems. Great. Then I took a turn to take a walk in the park. From the moment I entered the park till the moment I took an exit, I saw all the people staring down at their phones, watching all sorts of things but the articulate work of nature that is created for them- in front of them. Some people are swiping aimlessly, incessantly on their phones, boys and girls swiping in either left or right (I don’t know if they’re switching songs or people).

When I came home, hoping that I do not have to see something horrible like this at my own home, I was stunned to see just otherwise. At home, everyone was either swiping up or down through their messages on WhatsApp, unaware of the pleasant morning that is in front of them. I asked them about what was going on, they told me that it was the best time to see all communications, emails, and texts. Some got their tea cold, some lost interest in the breakfast, and I felt a chill being sent through my spine. What have we become?

If you already don’t know that you’re now a product of the social engineering applications that are on your phone right now, then I worry about the state of people 5 years from now. We always love to say when we’re busy that we’re busy; then we get on social media apps every 10 seconds. We switch the screens faster than the train of our thoughts. You’ll never know when you got sucked into the vortex of the ‘algorithm’ of eliminating the concentration from your brains.

Without a single surgery, they have successfully destroyed your neural networks to learn things deep from within, understanding the essence of the very concept that may be used in the future. But these days, deliberately, the competition has been made so much faster than before that you don’t have enough time to think (or you’re made to think that way). Or maybe, they’ve obliterated your capacity and choice to think consciously on subjects, matters, and pressing issues.

Let me give you an example. I did a type of experiment in the Chemistry lab for six consecutive years, on different chemicals, for different purposes. The experiment is called ‘Titration’. Those who already know it, wait till you find out the connection I make with this. And for those who don’t know, let me explain. In this experiment, we take a chemical that is highly concentrated in a beaker. Then we add another chemical to it, drop by drop. We keep on doing it until we achieve some sensible result that we can interpret and draw conclusions from.

What happens if we keep on adding it beyond a certain limit? There are some scenarios. We will spoil the experiment by diluting the original chemical too much. We then cannot draw any conclusion from it. Sometimes, we get a different color than what is expected out of a solution. That will give us wrong results. Let alone going beyond the limit, if we put the chemical B slightly more than what is necessary, then the experiment will lose its perfection by 30-50%.

Our personality has a similar thing to this. We have our own intelligence, our own flaws, and our own capacities. If we unnecessarily put the information in it, we start losing the capacity of our brain, mind, and overall intellect. If we dump too much information in the brain at once and at a rapid pace, then we will reduce our brains into a dumping yard and not a source of the useful intellect for the betterment of people.

You may think that I am an expert on all these matters, but I am not. I am just here to share my observations with you. The movie ‘social dilemma’ has shown the things that social media giants do to us so perfectly that it’s impossible to simply ignore what is happening to us and sip from the cup of tea.

This concentration campaign has gone so far that even the best of the media creators; have now resorted to making shorter and shorter videos every now and then just to keep the audience engaged in their channel, and not lose the subscriber count they have achieved so far by putting huge efforts. Earlier, there used to be videos that explained the concepts about anything in detail. There was room for interaction for people with the creator since it is very difficult to understand everything in one go. Now, the explanations have gone from 45 minutes to ‘under 45 seconds’, which is terrible.

Because no matter how crisp a video clip you can make, there are thousands of concepts that just cannot be explained in 45 seconds. People sometimes need their entire lifetime to understand the nature of that concept. For example, some scientists spent their entire lives understanding fundamental quantum mechanics.

But these days I see people explaining in reels and shorts those concepts of QM, which is a load of crap. This has severely damaged the understanding and attention of our people wanting to learn something genuinely.  Some think that they have understood it in 4 seconds, while others think that they can explain it in 45 seconds. Now nobody wants to listen to anyone speaking for more than that.

This campaign will take a toll on our intelligence very soon. You can ignore this as just another article that is being written against the new things that people like. But for those who want to take it as a warning bell, I have done my job. You always don’t need to wait for research to come out and tell you that something is bad. That means you’re waiting for someone to be victimized, failed, and damaged beyond repair. There are, of course, good sides to it, too. Short time source of entertainment is now available globally, which is very good.

Some quick marketing can be done in that span, which is also good enough for companies to be in touch with you. But the damage done shouldn’t be overshadowed by that little good done by any tool. With that, I’ll leave this to your best judgment, wishing you to not be a victim of this mechanization of human beings and reducing you to obedient, thoughtless bots!