How Digitalization Affects Our Needs for Smart Consumption and Filtered Contents

Digitalization Era: Never in Human History Before …

I think, not many of us realized: We are living in a very exciting era, where the old world – slow and not-globally-connected via internet – is fastly vanished and the new era of digital globalization arises. Most people I know, born after 1990, are now globally connected. We have our global culture, and it is not the same as ever before.

The fact that the internet globalized our culture, the human understanding of how the world should function and in what kind of system we want to live becomes more and more united. Before it was mostly based on the country. The people living in Europe have mostly no idea how the people living in Asia lives and what kind of problems they encounter. They probably never wrote to one before.

TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, all of these social media platforms on the internet, have made it possible for people from different countries to connect with people around the world, even with language barriers. As you may know, those social media platforms offer translation for their comments. So, they might understand each other. I don’t think my mother and even my siblings – born after 1980 – have their teenage years spent commenting and connecting indirectly worldwide, like most of us did.

Digital Overconsumption

a. How lonileness causes digital overconsumption

Humans overall, like any other mammals, are social beings. We are not programmed to survive alone. The fact that we can have social digital interaction, without even interacting directly with other human beings, take away the fulfillment we feel in socializing, which affects our mental health immensely.

This has been proven by many, and we see the effect in the lockdown of Covid-19 pandemic, how the loneliness of the lockdown can kill us more than the danger of the Covid-19 itself.

I still remember, how I and several colleagues from university were so happy that we were going into the lockdown, specially the first year. And then the biology hits, and we are all to become more anxious and lonely. That’s where all the Zoom meetings didn‘t matter anymore, and we were all craving real connection.

As an international student, living alone in Munich, having no family around, my loneliness at that time was pretty big because I could not visit any other mates in their room due to lockdown and there’s no party, where I can get to know some people. It was all Zoom meetings. And going back home to Indonesia would give me more stress due to the ±14 days quarantine, If I have a one-month vacation, the half of it is already gone for the quarantine. Yup, I decided it’s not worth it and stayed in Germany.

Some of us, including me, come to this realization, where we don’t care anymore whether we get Covid-19 or not. We only want to live and socialize with other humans. That was the reason why I started working and doing all sorts of projects online, that I never did before or even thought I’m going to do it, just to ease the pain of loneliness in the lockdown and reaching out for connection to the people around the world, who can understand me.

That’s when I started consuming all sorts of content on social media and learning new things all by myself. I quickly realized most of these contents are not really well-thought-out, and I thought I could make better informative contents and connect with other people digitally worldwide. I want to share my authentic experience here: living, working, and studying medicine abroad in Munich, Germany. Not only that, but I started making YouTube and TikTok videos and spent most of my time calming my loneliness with it.

Still, it doesn‘t fulfill me enough, and I started building my own website, finding out how interesting it is to code. And then there’s AI, what is it? And it seems like medicine will be digitally revolutionized by this AI industry, and the health care system is ancient and overwhelmed with bureaucracy due to a very strict data and privacy policy in Germany and all the paper works.

Over-Consumption = Privilege !?

I realized that most people on earth are already struggling to consume high quality content. Most people feel privilege if they are overconsuming. The truth is the type of contents you consumed are much more important than before. There are time in history where consuming already hard enough and this is not become the case in our life anymore. We are living in so much contents and filtering it to the best possibles is the way to go and more and becoming a smart consumers is always the way to go.

b. The Reason of Young Adults' Lack of Concentration

It was really overwhelming in the university with our professors from the pre-digital era were struggling to use Zoom and online teaching. They even have problems with controlling their camera, still remember that cat’s face Zoom meeting meme and other funny zoom meeting moments on lockdown?

The fact that all of us have to quickly adapt to the new online world that changing exponentially over the years, made us very anxious and overwhelmed. Even the medicine faculty in Munich, gave us one free semester because of the pandemic. The anxious thoughts also consumed me and I tried to suit myself with digital overconsumption on social media. That's how, I end up every week in my therapist's chair, trying to cope with this new situation “Living in Lockdown Vacuum”.

Therapy is a better way to cope with loneliness, than digital over-cosumption.

I remembered, it was hard for me to focus on my study due to lack of real life socialization at the university and I was contemplating quitting medical school to study informatics – because at least they have more online meetings and made numerous group projects together online –, so I thought. And I was serious about it, until many talks in my therapy chair, and after I went to so many events, where I got a more in-depth understanding about my motivation and where I really want to go in life. And here I am, still standing in my medical school.

The High Needs for Smart Filtered Consumption and Great Authentic Contents

After the lockdown and all the overconsumption that caused by the loneliness at that time, we are coming into a clearer understanding of what we really need from digital world. As we are all gaining real life connection again after all the horrible lockdown, we don't want to consume mindlessly on the internet. We want to consume smartly, where we can easily research, collect knowledge or informations, and learn as quickly as possible. Apple mostly wants to make the Swiss Army knife's products for our digital world, but we realized more and more, that every single phase of life or skills requires different specific needs.

Let’s say a child in elementary school. Having an iPad for this kid could probably help them learn. But the fact that most Apps on iPad are more interesting than the learning itself, is hindering the child to learn. Also the screen is not good for the eyes. We adults are not much different in this case. Specially students – young adults –, researchers, and all sort of creators, are in higher needs of specific creation devices.

Specific Creation Devices

a. Why are they so expensive?

If I can give an analog in photography, the specific device could be a Leica M6, which can only take photos and with film. The camera is costly, something around 9,000 EUR only for the body, not yet for the lenses, but can really do the job for photography in the best possible way for this age. While of course, with that amount of money, we have so many other options of hybrid cameras that can do photo- and videography. But these devices have to compromise, and they are not the best in their special field, only good enough for social media marketing purposes.

b. Creation Devices for Student's Needs

For researchers, medical students, or students overall, the needs are pretty high. We students don’t really need all the shiny looking apps. Our concentration span is pretty limited due to age and several other factors, such as technologically quickly changing world.

We need e-Ink display for everything

Most students live in a growing body and their eyes are still developing. It’s not healthy and unfair for students to use the display, that is clearly not as good as paper. Now where the e-Ink display is on the rise, I think most company should really think about the possibility to make devices that easy for the eyes.

E-Book readers with annotation

We want some really high-quality consumption device, that gives us realizable input of knowledge and not some opinions from some creators online on social media. We require e-books reader, where we can easily annotate and directly move the annotation in an .TXT file, where we can later edit, so we can grasp more information.

Writing and Typing Devices Distraction Free

Another thing what we also need is a writing and typing with e-Ink devices, that’s quick and also have enough colors. Because we learn easily with diagrams, and we need to see the picture as well.

An official forum, where we can put questions, answers, share, and calculate our understanding.

For medical students, ANKI is one of them. And there are plenty of apps, that help students to do that. But having one, where students can share it and interact directly is not yet to be found. It’s all scattered, and we are really in need of that.

In my years of learning and studying, I realized nothing beats learning and understanding a topic together, where you can interact and ask questions directly, in a fun environment, that makes you excited and addicted to learn more. I think some sort of gamification is needed in this field.

I can imagine an open-source chat group, where students, teachers or professors, can together edit questions and answers, and lock it if it’s perfect and also give it ratings from easy to hard. Then the chat sections under the question, where the members of the group can easily ask more questions. I think DocsDocs is doing a fantastic job with it.

But a software that can do ANKI, DocsDocs, and WhatsApp-Chat Group, would be remarkable for most students.

In my opinion, teachers and professors don’t need to teach anymore, but rather clarify the misunderstanding of a concept of each student individually on a topic. We have e-books and YouTube videos on the internet, that can explain it. And if there’s none, then what a teacher or a professor should do is add on the videos, explaining it.

Specific Educational Consumption with AI Helps

I can even imagine, that every single university or school now has their AI for specific topics. Students should learn with AI, asking questions and get direct answers. If it’s not working, they can refer to the forum. The AI itself needs to be built by the university or may be one day we have a universal AI for every topic, instead of ChatGPT, where everyone expects it knows everything.

The AI will also give us enough materials: sounds, pictures, videos, etc. And probably can test us daily and tell us, how much progress we made and what we need to do better and where to concentrate.

Will pen and paper disappear?

Pen and paper have already there helping humans evolve since the early time. I don’t think, we as humans will one day stop scribbling, either on stone, paper or other materials. I somehow believe it’s programmed in our genes to create and use our fingers for creations: from fantasy in our head to real imagination to communicate it with other people.

The number one reason why pen and paper will not disappear, is because of the cheap production costs. While having all in one specific creation e-Ink tablet for sketching, writing, reading, and typing is much pricier. It uses high-end processors and made with chip from metals, that’s not available infinitely on our earth. So, having such devices will help, but learning and creating manually without any help from high-end devices will stay forever.

I think the new Remarkable Pro with colors and fast e-Ink display is close to perfection for students, researchers, or creators. It has everything you need to create and not really to consume unintentionally.

But do we really need it? That’s a hard question that requires a lot of self reflection, since every individual has different budgets and needs. For me, as a student presently, I’m pleased with all of my gadgets. I have a computer, kindle, tablet, smartphone and digital cameras, that help me create everything I require online. It’s my responsibility to make sure that I’m consuming intentionally, learn, and creating more stuffs.

How I work and create

Pen and Paper

I mostly start everything with pen and paper. Brainstorming all the things that I know freely without rules and connecting the parts that I understand. For the parts that I don’t understand, I create an outline with questions with pen and paper.

Specific Digital Consumption = Collecting Specific Data

Then I research with ChatGPT, Google, Social Media, e-Book, and try to answer all my questions as detailed as possible in a document. I found a mix of sketching, writing, and typing will be the best for this. I think having a Remarkable Pro and a laptop can cut a lot of distraction caused by using different devices. But our smartphone and tablets are more than good enough, minus the e-Ink.

The Focus Thief: Comparing Yourself on Social Media – Media Literacy

At this point, I am probably expecting too much because I feel like sometimes, it’s not clear for a lot of us, that social media platforms are marketing platforms. It’s not meant to be for real people to find real connections. It marketed that way a long time ago, but now we realized it just a company that needs to make wins. So, to compare ourselves with everyone we know on social media, shows the lack of media literacy.

Every single person in the capitalistic world needs to be able to market themselves intentionally. There are many goals, some people use Instagram as Tinder and LinkedIn to find potential partners online, some people use LinkedIn to attract companies they are eager to work with. So social media is not real life, it’s a portfolio of what someone is doing and how they brand and market themselves.

If you feel like you are getting traps in this social media jealousy, it could probably show your lack of social media literacy. In this case, you most likely really need to work on understanding marketing and branding online.

Knowledge Organizing and Editing

For writing, it’s mostly on an app, where I organize the bigger topic and make a structure to make me understand where the dot is and where to connect it, to understand specific concepts.

I think what helps the most is after all the outlining, questioning, researching, and collecting data, is RE-OUTLINING with the newest understanding. There where you can find yourself at the end of the learning or creating trips.

In medical school there are tons of things you need to remember and apps such as ANKI and DocsDocs are good to test your understanding. If I create content online, it probably will be something like Final Cut Pro or Light Room.

The Last Part: Finished!

As a student finishing means mostly taking a test and pass it. As a content creator, you are not finished yet, if you don’t upload your creation: articles, pictures, or videos – online. There’s a saying, if it’s not online it did not happen.

Conclusion

Social Media has flawed our perception of our needs for connection. The social media connection is not deep enough to fill our needs as social beings, and it caused many overconsumption online. Most overconsumption is due to loneliness, and it’s an addiction that can be cured with real connection.

The overconsumption also reduces our ability to focus on learning and creating, which directly affects our mental health and can hinder our psychological and social growth in real life. What we require currently is.

1. More direct and real social interaction – not online –
2. And reduce the overstimulation trough creation. We require either specific devices, that help us to create intentionally, or we need to consume specifically.
3. Spent our time in connecting and enjoying activities far away from the display, as much as possible. Which contributes to better mental health and fulfillment in life.