Sergei Kapitsa said that the Internet leads to impoverishment of the soul. Let’s assume it is. But is it the Internet’s fault?
Leafing through the pages of the Internet, I found the words of S. P. Kapitsa: “Not a computer can bring a person, but the Internet. The remarkable Russian psychologist Aleksey Leontiev said in 1965: «An excess of information leads to impoverishment of the soul.» These words should be written on every site.”
Yes, the head is not a dustbin to stuff it with anything. Everything that I see, hear, feel, experience, never gets out of my head. The brain can neither get rid of what has got into it, nor digest everything in a row, but finds a way out of this seemingly hopeless situation. Doomed to be Plyushkin, he sorts out the unnecessary on the shelves in the basements and attics of the unconscious, so that in consciousness it is usually more or less tidied up and clean. Cyberneticists claim that no more than 2% of the content of the psyche is usually displayed in the field of active awareness. If necessary, you can look into the remaining 98% living on the shelves and extract the right one. True, there are neither reliable guarantees once or twice and find, nor the certainty that the lids will not be torn off from the cans hidden in memory so that the roof will go and not understand, «I’m going crazy or ascending to a high degree of insanity.»
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But the Internet is developing, and in 2015 we are promised an outside — free Wi-Fi anywhere in the world, and no one will write in the top page of every site that «an excess of information leads to impoverishment of the soul.» Because the redundancy of information is not determined by kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, etc. bytes, but by the needs of the soul, making its way in the ocean of information. Isn’t it stupid to give her the role of a pilot if she becomes impoverished in swimming?
Speed and information are one of the main conquests of the time. They also have a reverse side noticed by I. Ehrenburg. We fly, he said, and before people rode on the fold, and they had time to think. And a child who was once told fairy tales could think and experience more than today, who launches any fairy tale by touching the screen of the iPad. Behind this reverse side, it is important not to overlook that information educates (nourishes and grows) the soul. The question is how we navigate with the help of the information of the soul brought up in the field of tension of these opposites inherent not only in the Internet so that the soul does not become impoverished and suffocated, but breathes deeply.
I have no ready answers to this question or recipes. Living at the very beginning of the information age, in which we all have to get used to one way or another, I can only, to the best of my ability, ask myself questions and look for answers to them. And here’s what I see as the most important thing…
I have to free myself from the childish perception of life, when the closet is to blame for the fact that I hurt myself on it, the jar of jam — for the fact that I felt sick on the penultimate spoon, and the Internet — for the fact that behind it I do not see the movements of my own soul. And take responsibility for how and why I use this powerful and double-edged tool. I have no other possibility not to turn the oasis of the soul into a bare desert. The Internet is like alcohol, about which R. Gamzatov said: “Everyone can drink. You just need to know where and with whom, for what, when and how much.
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Chatter on the Internet is like chatter on a bench: for one it’s a way to live, for another it’s sometimes a break, unwind, for a third it’s an unacceptable thing, and he will go into the forest to wander alone or sit down with Homer. The Internet world has everything and a little more, and clicking on this or that is my choice and no one else’s. The Internet does not give rise to gossips, but a gossiper will find where to gossip in it, like a lonely chess player with whom to play a game, a bedridden music lover — good music, and living in a Siberian village — to sit in the Library of Congress or wander around the main museums of the world.
When I get stuck in it, I remind myself that it is a mirror in which I look and which very brightly and clearly shows me what I am in my life outside the Internet. And then you might think: break the mirror or put yourself in order? I don’t know about you, but my soul whispers to me: “Don’t, don’t break it.” Then I take a camera and go to the park to the swan with a newspaper.