I am sure that you know what "Going Viral" means. We hear it all the time, but did you ever think about the "cost". What cost, you ask? You must know that nothing is "free" and that is the idea of this blog.
I think that "going viral" means that over a million people have seen what ever it is. It could be a mother mouse eating all her babies or something just as weird or stupid, but people tune in and take the time to look at the thing. Many times things that have "gone viral" have ended up on the national news. That just gives you an idea of just how far this thing has gone. If you look at things that have "gone viral", 99.9% are mental zeros and have absolutely no social redeeming value, yet we know several million people have taken the time out of their lives and wasted it looking at it.
Let's say that it takes two minutes to view one of these "gone viral" things on your computer and that the average items that "goes viral" is viewed by two million people. With a little of your 4th grade math, that is 4 million minutes of human attention. If we think about the average person having 10 hours per day of actual mental attention, again with our 4th grade math, that works out to 219,000 minutes a year. Now let's go back to our average "gone viral" item, which consumed 4 million human attention minutes. This means that for every item that "goes viral" that it consumes the equivalent of 18.26 years of human mental attention. Now, this is just the start.
There has to be at least 5 to 10 items per day that "go viral". Do you agree with that? Let's just use 5 for the example here. In a year we would be talking about items that "go viral" eating up 33,325 human year long attention lives. It would be like this number of people were killed by "gone viral" items since they would have been mentally removed from the human race.
Now, the whole business of "going viral" is a new thing in human history, we have to ask exactly what did us humans do with all those minutes of human mental attention in the past? The fact that the human race has even gotten to this point when so many other animals have gone extinct, we must have been doing something right for all those millions of years. We have to ask our selves what is the impact of the "going viral" having on the human race and its future if it affectively kills 23, 325 mentally per year?
I think the impact is "bad" and since us humans view it like watching grass grow that it will be a very long time before we realize the negative impact. My fear is that by then it will be far too late.
PS--Remember the story "Tom Sawyer"? The first few lines in the book were about "Aunt Polly" calling for Tom Sawyer. She wanted to know where Tom was and what he was up to. Like most kids, Tom was out getting into mischief. Today, when a parent calls for one of their kids, you can bet they are on some kind of computer in their bed room with their "human attention" consumed by a worthless "Gone Viral" image on their computer. As a human with a brain, I would prefer Tom Sawyer over 90% of our kids today.
I think that "going viral" means that over a million people have seen what ever it is. It could be a mother mouse eating all her babies or something just as weird or stupid, but people tune in and take the time to look at the thing. Many times things that have "gone viral" have ended up on the national news. That just gives you an idea of just how far this thing has gone. If you look at things that have "gone viral", 99.9% are mental zeros and have absolutely no social redeeming value, yet we know several million people have taken the time out of their lives and wasted it looking at it.
Let's say that it takes two minutes to view one of these "gone viral" things on your computer and that the average items that "goes viral" is viewed by two million people. With a little of your 4th grade math, that is 4 million minutes of human attention. If we think about the average person having 10 hours per day of actual mental attention, again with our 4th grade math, that works out to 219,000 minutes a year. Now let's go back to our average "gone viral" item, which consumed 4 million human attention minutes. This means that for every item that "goes viral" that it consumes the equivalent of 18.26 years of human mental attention. Now, this is just the start.
There has to be at least 5 to 10 items per day that "go viral". Do you agree with that? Let's just use 5 for the example here. In a year we would be talking about items that "go viral" eating up 33,325 human year long attention lives. It would be like this number of people were killed by "gone viral" items since they would have been mentally removed from the human race.
Now, the whole business of "going viral" is a new thing in human history, we have to ask exactly what did us humans do with all those minutes of human mental attention in the past? The fact that the human race has even gotten to this point when so many other animals have gone extinct, we must have been doing something right for all those millions of years. We have to ask our selves what is the impact of the "going viral" having on the human race and its future if it affectively kills 23, 325 mentally per year?
I think the impact is "bad" and since us humans view it like watching grass grow that it will be a very long time before we realize the negative impact. My fear is that by then it will be far too late.
PS--Remember the story "Tom Sawyer"? The first few lines in the book were about "Aunt Polly" calling for Tom Sawyer. She wanted to know where Tom was and what he was up to. Like most kids, Tom was out getting into mischief. Today, when a parent calls for one of their kids, you can bet they are on some kind of computer in their bed room with their "human attention" consumed by a worthless "Gone Viral" image on their computer. As a human with a brain, I would prefer Tom Sawyer over 90% of our kids today.
