Have you ever walked into a cafeteria and seen so many good options for food that you just pick whatever food is the most familiar to you? If I’m being honest I don’t really like burgers and that kind of thing. If I’m in a massive food court with a bunch of cool options, I’m going to what is most familiar to me, even if I don’t like it that much. This phenomena can also be seen in day to day life with the way that people, particularly Gen Z, takes in information. Everyday you scroll on your phone, but how many of those reels can you remember? Seven? Five? Two? One? None? No one learns anything new, they simply reset to how they were before.
When asked multiple students said that they looked at around 200 short form videos per day. Only remembering 10 from that long scroll, and looking into none of those short form videos. They admitted that they found those videos interesting or worth looking into, but when asked one person said that she, “just didn’t see the point when I’m already seeing so much other stuff when I just scroll.” But people who only looked at 100 short form videos or less stated that they were more interested in the videos that they saw.
On average most people remembered around 12 to 13 videos, if they watched around 100 per day. Looking into two to three of those videos which they remembered. In my research those who were asked said they only watched around 100 reels, remembering significantly more than those who watch 200+, some even remembering 30 of the videos they watched. Out of the 30 videos they watched, they remembered only 10. The final person asked about this said that she only watched about 50 short form videos and remembered half of that, of the half remembered they looked into 15 of those stories told in those videos.
The more information that people consume the less, and less they can process. This concept is called information overload. When we consume lots of stimuli, like short form videos, and we process none of it, we learn absolutely nothing. It’s not that you can’t process that information, it is simply that you’re not giving yourself the time to think about what you learned. Lots of people will simply forget about all of the things that they saw, it is like spring cleaning for your brain. But nobody really wants to process information that much, because it’s not as stimulating to think about the cool stuff you’ve seen, it is stimulating, however, to see more videos which you will forget about in five minutes.
The professor for mass communications at Piedmont University, Joe G. Dennis. “Some people are overwhelmed, they just tune it out, retaining nothing.” he states, “The human mind is only ment comprehend so much. That is why a phone number is limited to ten numbers, because those are the ones we can call to memory instinctively. Because we have been processing those numbers for so long.” As we can clearly saw earlier, the more you consume the less you retain, and the less you care. The death of curiosity is when people think they know everything. Dennis also addresses this saying quote, “curiosity is human, however, just trying to get information told to them which they agree with, is not.” This is also a problem which has a made people generally more apathetic about the things they see around them.
They see so much and then when they look it up, they get a fluffy feel good answer. It makes people not care, because why would they? The answer they found on Google AI agreed entirely with their previous sensibilities, so they can just “trust their gut.” Dennis states that, “You will stop pursuing a difficult truth when ai or your for you page says exactly what you want to hear.” Causing people to become numb and not think critically, the death of curiosity is when no one cares, and when everyone thinks they are smarter than they are.
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