Talk is good, thought is better.

We, the human race, are conducting an uncontrolled and mostly unconscious experiment on ourselves. OK, we’re also seriously messing with the planet but now it appears we’re also fucking with our own heads too. Seriously. What I’ll call hyper-communication is changing the way we think, maybe even the way we can think.

There are over 4 billion mobile phone connections worldwide. Tens of billions of calls and texts are made daily. It’s hard to put a global average figure on it but my own straw poll people send or receive 30 or 40 texts and calls daily. Add in emails, 247 billion daily worldwide, and the average person manages just minutes of concentration before being interrupted.

In the past time was given to considered communication; a letter was carefully formulated, a phone call planned and undertaken. No more. There is no time. The dynamics of modern life demand instantaneous response. Considered or not. Concise or not. Hyper-communication is devaluing information.

In the past decisions were made on the ground, based on the presented realities of the moment. In action. Now they’re a call away, abstracted and uninformed by the situation. Decision making processes are being digitally deferred, centralised, controlled. A digital dictatorship somewhere down the line, maybe?

Unconsidered communication could lead to unforeseen consequences in the way we can physically think. The brain, like any system, follows the path of least resistance. Like any tool used in the wrong way it gets broken. It no longer functions in the same way. Sudden intellectual evolutionary pressures as we are experiencing now are novel. And totally unpredictable.

The mind is a muscle. It needs to be used, flexed. Otherwise it withers, weakens. Epigenetics suggest that events parents’ experiences can directly influence their progeny, down several generations. We appear to be able to write own DNA, in a strange way. But we’re writing randomly, communicating without consideration and unknowingly passing on unknowns to our descendents.

Communication has made us what we are. Human beings. Unconsidered communication is clutter. What this clutter will do to our consciousnesses and those of our kids’ is anyone’s guess. Let’s hope for the best.