It goes without saying (although I’m going to say it anyway!) that each generation looks at its own as the best. The most sophisticated, the most advanced, the greatest achievements, the best tools. The most modern. While this is true about some of these (achievements, advancements, etc.) we could argue at length about the level of sophistication (which is partly dependent upon how you define that term). The other terms used to describe generations are often simply the bias associated with the familiar. Either way, “modern” is usually defined as “current” or “what’s going on now.” The attitude that all previous generations were less “not as good,” less sophisticated or quaint usually carries more than a hint of nostalgia, of a yearning for a time less fast-paced; more relaxed.
Each generation views things as speeding up. And while this is a cliché you hear said (usually by old people), I do think the pace has picked up dramatically. My grandfather was a young man of around 20 when Wilbur and Orville flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, and he lived to watch man land and walk on the moon. In one lifetime! Twenty or so years after his death the internet was born; today it’s hard to recall what it was like when you actually had to pull your copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the shelf to look up Peter the Great. If you look at movies from the 40’s and 50’s and compare them to movies today, the difference is pronounced and obvious. It’s much more than color and CGI, too; the rapid camera movements and quick perspective changes has become a metaphor for the barrage of information coming at us in society today. By the time your brain has registered an image, a different one is being displayed. Instead of long, smooth and paced scenes, you get impression after impression after impression, in a staccato of brief images almost too fast to put into any kind of coherent pattern.
It strikes me that our lives have become like that (probably why directors and cinematographers are using that convention in films): we almost don’t have time to register what’s going on in front of us before the next event is thrust upon us. We certainly don’t have time to reflect. For someone with an introspective nature, that presents some challenges. When and how do you process these events? How do you learn from what’s going on around you? Or do you learn? Maybe you are supposed to just let all this stuff get absorbed intact, pushed down into your subconscious, and then gradually let Freud (or your Freudian nature, to be more grammatically correct), sort it all out. Not sure that I would define that as a good thing!
I was scrolling through my Facebook site this morning and it struck me how that site has become a reflection of this phenomenon. I have several hundred “friends” on Facebook (what that really means is probably a topic for another post!), but FB algorythms track what I do, who and what I “Like” or comment on, and then present me with what their programmers think are likely who or what I want to follow. The paternalism of that aside, I still get a ton of very short, staccato impressions of frozen moments in time of the people I follow. It gives what I think is the false impression of connecting with those people, because first of all, they have no idea whether I’m paying attention right now or even receiving their postings. And second, while most of our lives are pretty mundane, we put things on Facebook that show how much fun we’re having, or what our beautiful and incredibly talented kid/kitty/dog are doing right now. Or even worse, we “repost” something that someone else wrote or recorded (which takes no more thought or effort than clicking a button), as if we’re too lazy or busy to create our own lives, and we have to live vicariously through other people’s posts.
But I digress. My impression this morning was how quickly things become old news. I must have scrolled through 40 or 50 posts in a few minutes, and when I looked at how far back in time I had gone, it was less than a couple of hours. In order to find information from yesterday, I would have to scroll down through pages and pages and pages of posts. If you take a day off you can miss a lot! (I’m sure that’s part of the FB strategy: keep people coming back frequently or they feel they’ve missed out.)
To put this in some kind of context, I’m thinking about the death of my long-time friend Mike Katke, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident less than a week ago (4 and a half days ago, as I write this). Yet to find any FB postings about it, I have to use the search feature; it simply takes too long to scroll down. So what is a catastrophic loss for his family and an incredibly heart-wrenching event for me is practically lost in the background noise of Facebook in just a few days. While Mike’s family is trying to come to grips with this terrible shock, the rest of the world (at least as represented by Facebook) has moved on. And while that inevitably happens (and has always happened down through history), the speed at which it takes place means that whatever lessons were there to be learned from a tragedy such as this are missed. We don’t have time to reflect on the importance of our friendships and commit to telling friends and family that we love them. We don’t think about our own driving habits and commit to being more careful on the road. We don’t realize that life is short and if we really want to take that trip or learn Spanish or get back into woodworking that we shouldn’t put it off as we may not get the opportunity later. We don’t realize we’ve allowed friends to drift away and give them a call or write a letter.
And clicking the “Like” button on Facebook doesn’t do the job, either.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer.
Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.
It’s a Facebook world!
It goes without saying (although I’m going to say it anyway!) that each generation looks at its own as the best. The most sophisticated, the most advanced, the greatest achievements, the best tools. The most modern. While this is true about some of these (achievements, advancements, etc.) we could argue at length about the level of sophistication (which is partly dependent upon how you define that term). The other terms used to describe generations are often simply the bias associated with the familiar. Either way, “modern” is usually defined as “current” or “what’s going on now.” The attitude that all previous generations were less “not as good,” less sophisticated or quaint usually carries more than a hint of nostalgia, of a yearning for a time less fast-paced; more relaxed.
Each generation views things as speeding up. And while this is a cliché you hear said (usually by old people), I do think the pace has picked up dramatically. My grandfather was a young man of around 20 when Wilbur and Orville flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, and he lived to watch man land and walk on the moon. In one lifetime! Twenty or so years after his death the internet was born; today it’s hard to recall what it was like when you actually had to pull your copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the shelf to look up Peter the Great. If you look at movies from the 40’s and 50’s and compare them to movies today, the difference is pronounced and obvious. It’s much more than color and CGI, too; the rapid camera movements and quick perspective changes has become a metaphor for the barrage of information coming at us in society today. By the time your brain has registered an image, a different one is being displayed. Instead of long, smooth and paced scenes, you get impression after impression after impression, in a staccato of brief images almost too fast to put into any kind of coherent pattern.
It strikes me that our lives have become like that (probably why directors and cinematographers are using that convention in films): we almost don’t have time to register what’s going on in front of us before the next event is thrust upon us. We certainly don’t have time to reflect. For someone with an introspective nature, that presents some challenges. When and how do you process these events? How do you learn from what’s going on around you? Or do you learn? Maybe you are supposed to just let all this stuff get absorbed intact, pushed down into your subconscious, and then gradually let Freud (or your Freudian nature, to be more grammatically correct), sort it all out. Not sure that I would define that as a good thing!
I was scrolling through my Facebook site this morning and it struck me how that site has become a reflection of this phenomenon. I have several hundred “friends” on Facebook (what that really means is probably a topic for another post!), but FB algorythms track what I do, who and what I “Like” or comment on, and then present me with what their programmers think are likely who or what I want to follow. The paternalism of that aside, I still get a ton of very short, staccato impressions of frozen moments in time of the people I follow. It gives what I think is the false impression of connecting with those people, because first of all, they have no idea whether I’m paying attention right now or even receiving their postings. And second, while most of our lives are pretty mundane, we put things on Facebook that show how much fun we’re having, or what our beautiful and incredibly talented kid/kitty/dog are doing right now. Or even worse, we “repost” something that someone else wrote or recorded (which takes no more thought or effort than clicking a button), as if we’re too lazy or busy to create our own lives, and we have to live vicariously through other people’s posts.
But I digress. My impression this morning was how quickly things become old news. I must have scrolled through 40 or 50 posts in a few minutes, and when I looked at how far back in time I had gone, it was less than a couple of hours. In order to find information from yesterday, I would have to scroll down through pages and pages and pages of posts. If you take a day off you can miss a lot! (I’m sure that’s part of the FB strategy: keep people coming back frequently or they feel they’ve missed out.)
To put this in some kind of context, I’m thinking about the death of my long-time friend Mike Katke, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident less than a week ago (4 and a half days ago, as I write this). Yet to find any FB postings about it, I have to use the search feature; it simply takes too long to scroll down. So what is a catastrophic loss for his family and an incredibly heart-wrenching event for me is practically lost in the background noise of Facebook in just a few days. While Mike’s family is trying to come to grips with this terrible shock, the rest of the world (at least as represented by Facebook) has moved on. And while that inevitably happens (and has always happened down through history), the speed at which it takes place means that whatever lessons were there to be learned from a tragedy such as this are missed. We don’t have time to reflect on the importance of our friendships and commit to telling friends and family that we love them. We don’t think about our own driving habits and commit to being more careful on the road. We don’t realize that life is short and if we really want to take that trip or learn Spanish or get back into woodworking that we shouldn’t put it off as we may not get the opportunity later. We don’t realize we’ve allowed friends to drift away and give them a call or write a letter.
And clicking the “Like” button on Facebook doesn’t do the job, either.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer. Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.