I’ve seen a few things lately that have set me off on this path of thinking.
One was a vid on youtube (an anti-religion vid, but the anti religion aspect is irrelevant here)
The best way I can describe it is that information availability is improving at an exponential rate.
This availability means that anybody in a research field can very easily find information from almost anybody in another research field, or the same research field, and use it to improve his own work.
In short, the human race is becoming a more and more perfect Borg collective, but without the sinister intentions.
Everything is benefiting from knowledge of everything else. I just hope similarly mega-powerful capacity for stupidity and ignorance that the human race has doesn’t scupper this.
I think we’re a boom-or-bust species. It’s either trips to the stars or nuclear fireballs for all (barring Nature laying the smack down on our candy asses). And to think, we’ve only just begun… wait until we integrate with our machines. Whoa, mama.
See, that’s one of the reasons I think a board like the Straight Dope is so useful to me; it is my interface that screens things of interest to me and that I really should know, in a nice, user-friendly format and all in one place.
Given that it’s easier to produce dreck than it is quality work, the explosion in availability means each of us in every field is exposed to an ever greater quantity of dreck as well as an ever greater quantity of good stuff.
In the old days, the various publications, groups, etc., served as gate-keepers to filter the dreck. Not so any more.
Iif anything, the net effect is we’ll be able to get more stuff wrong, based on more faulty information. A wrongness, once linked to and cited a few times, becomes a rightness; witness urban legends.
I’m not so sure about that. Unfortunately the flip side is that the sociopaths are finding each other, too, and feeding their idea of a ‘perfect’ world to each other.
Children beating each other bloody while another child films it for YouTube, or forwards it to their schoolmates. ** This happened a couple of weeks ago only five minute’s walk from my home.** A group of teenage GIRLS pushed another teenage girl off a railway platform and proceeded to jump down and beat her on the tracks, breaking her jaw, while another girl recorded the whole thing for a laugh. In the background, you can clearly hear a group of teenage boys laughing and supporting it.
What the hell is going wrong with the world when this kind of behaviour is not ‘tolerated’, not ‘glossed over’, not even ‘overlooked’…but actively supported by their peers as not only acceptable, but laudable?
It’s great that rational minds are getting out there on the 'net and attempting to spread rationality… but are they ultimately going to be on the winning side?
So long as the signal-to-noise ratio remains manageable, it’s definitely the age of information and connectivity. I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.
The behavior hasn’t changed, just the technology. When I was in high school twenty years ago, there were instances where people were ganged up on and beaten up while others looked on and laughed. I am totally certain those people would have video taped it and put it on the internet if they could have.
As was already mentioned, kids are dicks. And they don’t think before they act. It’s been that way forever.