New positive habits that arrived with new technologies

No, I was never the kind of person who reads a lot, reading was not the funniest activity of my childhood by far. I was too active to sit down and spend some hours of my day just absorbing information from a static object called a book. As some of us saw Prince Ea. video: “I SUED THE SCHOOL SYSTEM !!!", and if you havent you should, we should accept that people are different and understand they have way different needs to absorb knowledge.

Since I was young I have heard people saying we can learn by three different methods, reading, hearing and writing and by that time, it made a lot of sense, but let’s break it down for our generation. In 19XX, going to class and taking notes in your personal paper notebook was the only way people could study, books were not accessible, expensive and too difficult to produce in scale, newspaper was the best option for our daily base information. Moving forward in history, when radio arrives, news could be more accessible, but at that time it was too hard to develop some kind of mass education program by using radio, it would be expensive and not as personalized as it needed to be, radios was also too expensive.

Looking backwards, when print machines became more accessible, book prices dramatically went down and now millions of people had the acquisitive power to buy “knowledge”. This made the reading method of learning way popular, I like to think of this moment as a “knowledge independence day”. When TV arrived, entertainment was already a competency of learning and our attention was in the early attacks by monetization, suddenly people’s time was expended by watching something on the screen like soccer or football or comedy shows and soap operas. This moment was enabled by the Industrial Revolution that unlocked many other things in our society.

Let’s jump to recent days. When we deeply analyse what we have learned in the past, learning methods have a drastic increase in possibilities. With a computer in almost everybody’s hands, knowledge becomes accessible in tons of different shapes which makes me amazed by the inclusion. We have audiobooks with Audible, we have apps like 12 Minutes for a short version of books, we have many online schools running courses online live or recorded, from Udemy and Coursera to Harvard, MIT and Stanford, we also have YouTube, where anybody can give a shot and try to teach us something. Yes, they’re actually good @ in TikTok and Instagram to learn Chinese and English and many other things enabled by world Digital Transformation.

Now the challenge is absolutely just one. How can we plan our time so this massive amount of content becomes positive and relevant in your lifes? I would like it to be an easy answer, but it’s not. The only thing we know is, we desperately need to control our screen time because our attention is, more than ever, the new way of doing business. Look at The Social Dilemma in on Netflix to connect some of the dots. Time is money, and now, more than ever, Our time is somebody else’s money.

With all these new paths to learn, we can have many other articles to discuss. But some of the polemic questions it still remains:

  • Why do we still have school as an obsolete model of learning? Worse than that, some companies still select people by only looking at their school background.

  • Why do I still feel people addicted to reading are prejudiced over people learning by other methods?

  • I’ll keep this conversation alive in further posts! Thank you for all that has followed me in this writing journey!

Read this article on Medium