The Lebowski Complex - Part I of II: Growing Up 1.5
New information has come to light.
We are bombarded with data. Living in the Information Age has its drawbacks. A baby is introduced to the world in the form of her family. As a child, she comes to know a neighborhood, as if nothing else existed. She grows to know her town or part of the city and soon becomes a teenager. The teen explores the wonders of her state and country. By and by, her horizons expand and she determines her part in the mix. She, as a twenty-something, whittles out her niche in society and is on her way to becoming an informed citizen. She has now compiled so much local information that she broadens her base, gaining knowledge of the intricacies of her world. By her thirties she has, more or less, found out the context of her life. She now can proceed onward, able to decipher her experiences in this light.
This was Growing Up 1.0. Information was provided over time in manageable amounts: family (0-5 yrs./old), neighborhood (6-10), town/city (11-15), state (16-20), country (21-25), world (26-30). It took almost half a lifetime to understand the context of life.
Growing Up 1.0 until my preteen years, everything was going well. Then our family got the Commodore 64, a family home PC, and nothing was ever the same. The Commodore gave way to the HP desktop computer. The HP ran CompuServe online through a 56k modem. And a door was opened to an unimaginable trove of information. It was like putting a library in the basement. And it was new, which made it fun.
Searching the web in the early days was like playing Doom, waiting to see what popped up around every corner. It was engrossing and intriguing and I never wanted to stop. But I was still young and trying to get my bearings in life. I should have been looking at a local map, a manageable map. I wasn’t ready for the world map yet. I, like many other people, was stampeded by the bulrush of the Information Age. Growing Up 2.0 was like calling up a Little Leaguer to the Majors. We were out of our league.
The Dude just wanted his rug back.
So like Eddie Gaedel facing Bob Cain, I did nothing. I guess you could call it ‘trying to draw a walk,’ but in reality, I was frozen at the plate. I couldn’t swing at a pitch if I wanted to. We had already been living in the age of cable television that made the problem worse. Our choices increased tenfold from the previous generation as far as TV was concerned. This is when MTV actually played music and VH1 played old music. We even had The Box. This was a TV station that played music videos all day, but viewers could call in and select each song that played. It was a communal jukebox on television and probably the first hint at OnDemand. Our options, before the Internet was in flux, were already astounding. It was like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book the size of War and Peace.
This aggression will not stand, man.
Society was blindsided by the Internet. We’re still figuring out how to use it correctly. For the first few years, the Internet was like a man-child that had no idea how strong it was. It was a brute-force newborn. As it grew into its strength, we grew with it. We watched and chatted and emailed and talked amongst ourselves about this new, novel medium. And in crucial formative years, we were experiencing things that had never been experienced. We were the first generation to come of age with a worldview from the bedroom. We had been subjected to a breadth and depth of information that had never before been dropped on adolescents. And some of us were overwhelmed. But I always remember what the Dormouse said, "Feed your head."
Absolutely! Books and friends will always be around and always be necessary. But even these two institutions have been digitized. MySpace, Facebook, etc. have made friendship into a new, different entity. And books can now be self-published on the web in a print-as-ordered fashion. Books and friends, quite possibly two of the antidotes to the information overload, are also part of it.
Managing the information, as you said, is the goal.
Thanks for the comment!
There's a lot of misinformation out there that's proliferated over the internet as well. We have to learn to manage the information overload, then still pick up a book and visit a friend. We still need face-to-face education and social contact. Those human needs will never change.