I love reading recipes. Like buying books, they entail potential: When you buy the book, or read the recipe, you are making a secret, and oft-broken, contract with yourself - that you will read the book, or cook the recipe. You do not know the burnt dishes or dissapointing pages yet to come. You only know the hope of new beginnings.
I guess that's kind of like a relationship: The beginning phase is reading the recipe, or buying the book - an act of hope. As the relationship progresses, you notice the smudged page-corner, the slight overdoes of cumin, and eventually, you may desist - or you may decided that the words on page 288 and the melting cinammon in your mouth enthrall you too much for you to give it (her, him) up.
Recently however, the internet has started ruining this process of discovery. You see, it is now common to google or Facebook someone by the end (or even before the beginning) of the first date - a practice so common, there was an entire "How I Met Your Mother" episode dedicated to it, entitled, "History vs. Mystery". (Say what you want about the series, but as an indicator of current social trends, it is spot-on.) So there you are, discovering all this information, without having truly begun to know the person. Because we are human, and we live in a society that lacks privacy, much of this information may be negative, may entail the person's flaws.
Now, imagine six months in you discover you current significant other worked as a stripper, or curses when her/his boss gets drunk at the office. Let's also imagine that you happen to consider these facts negative, but because you already love your significant other, you decide they're worth putting up with. Now, let's imagine you discover those facts before the second date, when you like your significant other, but still havent' really gotten to know him/her - all of a sudden, those facts become deal-breakers, that prevent you from getting to the six-month mark, even though, had you gotten there, you might have found yourself engaged in a long-lasting and loving relationship.
The problem is, that humans have a thirst for knowledge. This is generally a good thing, but the internet has the ability to bring out the downsides to this thirst. Our ancestors (by and large) accepted that while they wanted to know everything, they didn't need to - there was knowledge worth pursuing, and knowledge that was simply not worth the time and effort. Today, that time and effort has diminished to the click of a button and the five minutes it takes to read a Wikipedia article or a Facebook profile - so all of a sudden, we NEED to know everything. It only takes a minute. The problem is, that the "only a minute" has then turned into an hour of reading related Wikipedia articles on information that has no bearing on your life and that you are likely to forget - of course, each article only took a minute, but the aggregate was an amount of time spent on Wikipedia that waas not proportional to how much time of your life the information was worth.
There is no more concept of not pursuing knowledge: Hey, I could spend an hour stalking my date, but I don't have to - I CAN "NOT KNOW" and will spend an hour reading a book, or doing something that is actually useful and enjoyable. Or even, hey, I could read three Wikipedia articles on the history of pencils, but since that's not a topic I am particularly interested in, I won't.
The best example of this is IMDB: Think about how much time you have (if you are a procrastinator like me) spend IMDB-ing actors, directors, etc. Then think about how much of this information you remember, and how much utility you've gotten out of it. Next, think about how much time your parents put into researching actors, directors, etc. - probably much less. Ask yourself if you think the amount of time you put in made your quality of life better in any way. The anwser is probably no, because generally, it is not essential to one's personal fulfillment and enjoyment of life to know every detail of Johnny Depp's love-life.
Of course, while you are online, you are simply thinking that you need to know about Johnny Depp's lovelife, and its only a click away, and how can you finish watching "Pirates of the Caribbean" without knowing about his recent separation from Vanessa Paris?
You see, we live in an era of information addiction: I mean that literally - a compulsive, habit-forming, need for online knowledge that can severely interfere with one's functioning in daily life if carried out to its furthest extremes. Generally, the thirst for knowledge (and, because I am religious, I will add: some help from God), has driven human progress. But I wonder how much progress this recent thirst-surge can drive - thanks to our internet-enablers, we are too busy updating our Facebook statuses about our newly found knowledge, to turn it towards more productive means - or are we?
No comments:
Post a Comment