Two Opposing Trends

There are two remarkable trends in society these days, as I see it. One is the binding together in increasing intricacy of the communications and information systems across the world, and on a person-to-person level at that. It never fails to amaze me that people from disparate places like Malaysia, Venezuela, or Chicago can just click onto my blog and “instantly” read my thoughts off their screens (as well as send e-mail). Just look at Wikipedia, and how easy it is to reference practically any topic that one can imagine. If I had paranoid tendencies (and who doesn’t, at least a little bit sometimes), I would feel very threatened by others having easy access to information about me. I know people who won’t even go near a computer for this reason. But I have a different take on things. I know that life is short, and one of the things that I’ve heard that the elderly regret is that they didn’t express themselves more boldly when they were younger. I hear all this talk about America and the Bill of Rights, with its First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech. So why not take advantage of it? Maybe somewhere, some agency is filing away my freely-given thoughts. So what? As I said before, life is short.

Which brings me to the second trend I’ve discovered around me. The best way for me to describe it is “entropy of interest”. As previously difficult-to-obtain information becomes more readily available, it seems (to me) that people are actually becoming less and less interested in others and, instead, are specializing their attention in certain “pet” areas that fit in with their own life narratives. For example, it is no surprise to me that people accessing this blog almost solely do so through searches of specific topics of interest and not to see what I write on a day-to-day basis. So the prevailing dynamics of the Internet and blogs, as I see it, are quite impersonal and indicative of a kind of dispersal of interest. The more interconnected people become, it seems, the more narcissistic they get as well. It sounds a bit paradoxical, I know, but I don’t know how better to express it.