The surge of technological breakthroughs in the past 100 years have “developed” and “cured” many things. For instance some say there are more violent crimes now than there were X years ago; There are more diseases, cancer is more widespread; More kidnappings; More teen-pregnancies…etc, (i know some are great generalizations )
But are any of these statements really true? Mabye there are more teen-pregnancies because there are more teens and the proportion hasn’t really changed…or maybe there are just more reportings of it, or more coverage of it…
This could be applied to each instance…
How do we know that the cancers diagnosed now haven’t Always been around and we just recently figured out what they were (after all cancer IS just an “abnormal growth of cells”)
IMHO, None of our problems today are new… just more coverage, reportings and methods of conducting the problems…
Well, the reporting thing is huge as there are a lot more reporters trying to justify their positions by reporting everything as “news.” Yeah, kids got pregnant in the 1790s, the difference is that we didn’t have a whole media complex that tried to report everything as a “crisis.”
Cancer deaths have gone up though, both in totality and in proportion. But then, this is attributable to two facts:
People aren’t dying as often of the things that killed us back in the 1850’s like cholera, tuberculosis, etc.
People are living longer, giving cancer a likelier chance of striking.
But I do believe that a lot of the so-called “problems” in todays world have always existed, it’s just that nobody has taken the time to isolate and analyze them.Z
I watched a program on obesity tonight. The problem is growing, if you will pardon the pun. Our ancestors had to do more physical labor than we do and were not as likely to be overweight. I believe that I understood the narrator to say that we consume about 700 more calories a day than we did forty years ago.
On man predicted that at this rate everyone will be overweight or obese a hundred years from now.
Child abductions have decreased considerably in the last few years according to a news program that I heard recently. It is the coverage that has increased.
I saw a news report recently stating that the teen pregnancy rate was the lowest in forty or fifty years! They didn’t go into the reasons, but I’d wager that it has something to do with the fact that people got married a lot younger back then. My wife’s grandmother was married at 16 and that wasn’t at all unusual in her day. What do you think a parent would do today if his high school sophomore suddenly announced that she was getting married?
Another thing people seem to think changes is the level of rebellion shown by teenagers. I can’t tell you how many times I heard older people whine “We didn’t act that way in my day! These kids today are out of control!”
Interestingly enough, scholars found a similar sentiment etched in Hieroglyphics by an ancient Egyptian. Nope, excessive teenage rebellion is not a new idea, grandpa. Not by a longshot. You’re looking back through rose-colored glasses.
Oddly enough it was released just before September 11, which put a different twist to the song. She’s quoted as saying it still applies just as well.
Regardless, as technology increases, our ability to effectively deal with problems should increase as well… but then so should our ability to make new problems.
One thing that is being overlooked here, there are far more people on the planet now than in years past, so of course all the things that go along with humanity will increase in numbers.
I believe that information overload is an actual new problem, or rather the stress that results from it. Never before (WAG) have we (in the “developed world”) been confronted with so much input each day.