With our wonderful age of technology, news is now not only readily available in just moments, but there is SO much of it that we can now even indulge in the unusual and bazaar, spectacular tales of hypothetical science that are only a few years from being realized, medicine breakthroughs and entertainment that spans the usual to stretching the very limits of the imagination.  We have access to the mundane and silly., to sadistic and dangerous.  We can access daily personal diaries from every type of human being ever ‘invented’ (by whatever)……………  We can buy the unexpected from any seller in the world. 

Sometimes there is a crash-race to get the most recent news or hot idea within moments of its being declared online by the push of a button from its author.  Often that story or stories are now repeated, refined, refocused over and over within minutes to an hour of its first appearance. 

I even believe that movies now being scripted and novels now being written are part of this vogue or this new age because they’ve become almost revolutionized, taking an audience into new dimensions never even thought of before of if they have, they take on new and inventive twists.  (People are actually reading again!)

I feel as though a heavenly bomb went off and everyone’s looking at or for rainbows in colours that have never been put together before….. and then…

….it occurred to me that almost all of us, even though we are constantly swamped or overwhelmed by more data than we can actually process adequately, we are demanding even more and more and more.  We start feeling ‘blah’ when we travel into the internet and do NOT find the unusual or uncommon, something brand new.

We even see that some things and stories are retakes of the past, or situations and things that have happened in the past or been revised from those in history…..

What happens when the human mind or imagination expands to its limit?  Can that happen?  Or do we just re-invent or realign what was before and see it as new?  How far can you stretch your mind to make something SO brand new, that no one has ever considered it before?

That’s one of the differences between a society and an individual.  While society overall may have seen and done much, each individual in that society has only seen a small fraction of it, and can only ever experience a small fraction of it in his or her lifetime.  So what’s old and blah for you is new and unusual to somebody else, and what’s new and exciting for you is boring for others.

You would be surprised with all the information availble, how ignorant people really are

I heard on the radio this morning that even with all the information available at peoples fingertips today, people are less informed now than they were in the 80"s.

You know, part of me finds that easy to handle.

Part of me wants to whack my head off the wall until I get an ASBO.

I can’t believe that people are that stupid. Truly. I like to think Glaswegians are smarter than that.

Maybe not the islanders. Half of them still go to the ‘talkies’ and have a night out on the town, a fish supper and get the (mule drawn) bus home and still get change from half a crown.

Most people are more interested in the latest reality show results or their favorite movie stars relationship status to worry about what the government is doing with their money and freedoms.

Quite true!

I forgot about bloody reality Tv for a moment there…

N E O - 30 July 2007 07:48 PM

I heard on the radio this morning that even with all the information available at peoples fingertips today, people are less informed now than they were in the 80"s.

Probably because we have been inundated with stupidity and advertising and have learned to tune it out.  Of course the side effect of this is that we pay less attention to information that might be useful or interesting to us.

To answer Hullitoons, this question is, I think, strongly related to what philosophers call the ‘technological singularity’.
As the speed of technological development increases exponentially, so do the means by which people communicate and ideas and thoughts are exchanged. Fast communication, access to information and stimulation of creativity are some of the basic things that make a culture grow and evolve (through ‘memes’, some would say). For instance, when I was ten, I learned how to write a letter, with an assignment to send a letter to a friend. Six years later, my little brother instead learned to send a mail.
I as well, believe the speed at which culture mutates is strongly linked to technological advancement.

It is thought that at the technological singularity, knowledge, culture, human kind and possibly even the planet itself will be ‘reinvented’. And as such, I believe that at that point, we come to a new range of possibilities that will allow us to expand our imagination.

And just to give another example. If you want to read every SF novel published in one year in English, even if you read a book a day, you’ll still need more than three years. Ok, most of it is like chewing on old shoes, but that still leaves quite a lot of newly imagined worlds to discover.

As final note:
With this much people on such an odd litle planet, I doubt imagination will ever run dry.