21st century was the golden age of audio-visual content. The people of those times were obsessed with consuming information in form of videos. The most popular thing of the time was something called ‘movies’ or ‘motion pictures’. Movie going was a popular activity where people in huge groups sat in dark indoor space and watched fictional stories get unfolded on a big screen. This gave rise to a breed of individuals called Celebrities. These people were regarded as the perfect beautiful beings of the time. Some were even revered as gods.
Not only that, with advent of digital technology there was a screen and a camera in everybody’s hand. By then recording yourself in form of a video was no longer a luxury. People made videos called vlogs every day as a routine. Some people filmed themselves excessively as a way to stay forever young. These videos were the solution to the problem ‘nobody lives forever’. Due to this medium, even after the passing of some great women and men of the time, they were viewed again and again.
Now, you might be wondering why am I explaining the concept of ‘videos’ in such great detail, right? Let’s just say it is for our future generations who hopefully won’t know much about the audio-visual content other than what they read in old articles. I believe that day is not far. Even now as we step into the second decade of the 22nd century there is a drastic fall in creation of audio-visual content. Largely the credit for that goes to an article published in the year 2083.
The article spoke of the fact that in the last one hundred years the ‘thinking capacity (T.C.)’ of people has dropped more than 25 points on the scale of 0 to 200. This article was result of a comparison between two global survey studies done almost a century apart. Once in the year 1993 and next in the year 2081.
The study also pointed out that the people of late 21st century had shorter attention span, were less sensitive to real emotions, reduced ability of imagination and information retaining capacity. Sure the people were more advanced then and achieved the many seemingly impossible feats. But that was primarily due to higher reliance on smarter computers.
Following the results, a deeper study was conducted to understand the cause of this drop in T.C. The problem was the way people consumed knowledge. By the late 21st century majority of the world’s population had entirely stopped reading and writing. The learning phase for children was through this audio-visual content. Result of that the rate of consumption increased but rate of retention dropped. Also during learning their minds were polluted with unwanted stuff.
As an example, the author spoke of a video lecture. “Say a kid is watching a teacher talk about physics. That student is learning about physics, but then the kid is also filling her memory with unnecessary stuff like what the teacher is wearing, the make up on her face and her hairstyle. This is not needed while learning physics. This is not a problem in actual physical teaching as since they know that the lesson cannot be viewed again the priority is on what is being taught in that moment.”
Fortunately this article was an eye opener for us and since then we as the intelligent species of Yugae have worked hard to fix the situation. We have been reducing the use of audio-visual content and focused more on building a healthy habit of reading and writing. Result of that effort the 22nd century is called the Century of Silent Words.
Nowadays we read a lot, write a lot more. From what we see around the world our situation is improving. If we keep it like this hopefully by the year 2180 when the next global survey is to be conducted we will have regained those lost T.C. points. I believe this change is in best interest of everyone.
Why did I write this article?
If you were born just a decade ago you must be very much used to this literary focused environment. But the reason I write is article is to refresh our memory. So that if in future we are tempted to return to the old way, we don’t.
back to LITERATURE SECTION
First of all thank you for reading this post. What you read here is not my absolute belief set in stone. I am always open for discussion and future alterations to the post. Actually I consider these posts as a conversation starter. So if you have an opinion to share, please do comment down below.