Social media makes people ‘lazy and stupid’

In an interview Edward De Bono gave to news.com.au, the Maltese thinker argued that Internet and social media cause people to be lazy:

“People say ‘I don’t have to think, information will make my decision for me’, and that completely rules out creativity using the information in a different way, or new way,” De Bono said.

He added that he doesn’t make use of social networking sites, because he doesn’t want to be “bullied by information”. According to De Bono, the fact that one just goes online and gets all the information he or she wants without having to think, is “very dangerous”.

De Bono said that social media is causing laziness: more people are relying on the internet for information and ideas.

“We just feel we’ll get more information and we don’t need to have ideas ourselves – we’ll get ideas from someone else, we don’t need to look at the data, we’ll just see what someone else has said,” De Bono said and added that schools should teach how to think.