# As much as I hate to rain on your parade, I’m afraid I can’t agree at all
with your premises.

You’ve written a short article that shallowly rehashes ideas that were already
long past their expiration date in the 70s, when they were…

* * *

As much as I hate to rain on your parade, I’m afraid I can’t agree at all with
your premises. This article itself argues against you.

You’ve written a short article that shallowly rehashes ideas that were already
long past their expiration date in the 70s, when they were being summarized in
Future Shock. You cite studies that don’t support your findings, and complain
about trends that are mostly imaginary. Ultimately, you’ve projected your own
subjective feeling of burn-out onto the world at large, channeling it into a
pastiche of what is essentially now a popular subgenre of theoretically non-
fiction op-eds: the anti-internet thinkpiece.

Have you constructed a media diet for yourself that negatively impacts your
life? Clearly. Is this common? Sure. Is it new? Not remotely. You’ve taken
perfectly good tools and used them to cut your limbs off, and now you’re
complaining that the tools are dangerous.

The only part of this article that is non-trivially correct is the part about
multitasking & unfinished task cues. But, the idea that this mechanism should
be used as an excuse to do some kind of internet detox is absurd. Instead, be
mindful of your own cognitive biases, and take advantage of this effect as
incentive to perform the tasks you intend to perform.

Easy access to information makes shallow understanding possible but does not
encourage it; after all, it also makes much deeper understanding possible. If
this access makes you tend toward shallowness, that’s an indication of your
own intellectual laziness, not a reflection of the innate tendencies of the
tools at your disposal. Practice some discipline, and these tools will help
you gain more depth. (Without much discipline and with only a little
foresight, it would have demonstrated to you that there is nothing original in
this essay; in Medium’s daily recommendation email alone, I see three of this
type a day, though they are often shorter and have fewer reviews or
recommendations. You could have saved time by recommending some of those,
rather than writing this yourself.)

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [July 5,
2016](https://medium.com/p/6d88cb5c68d0).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/as-much-as-i-hate-to-rain-on-your-
parade-im-afraid-i-can-t-agree-at-all-with-your-premises-6d88cb5c68d0)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.