The Challenge of Advancement in the Information Age

It's a picture of an angry mob. What do you see? Is it a society, nation, group or race? I don't know what this picture is. Perhaps a depiction of an event where the caption says it happened, instantly portrayed as truth. With every view on the Internet, every musing, the conversations turning into spokes, the ire of the thread ebbs or flows, the charts look wrong in one view but right in another. Who really cares? The statistics of our media habits aren't so revealing anymore, so who is advancement of technology and communication really for?

In the past twenty years, what has been the effect of mainstream communication on me, as an information bound human being? I don't know - I have grown up in its cocoon, and I've never looked outside it. In the past ten years, I can say the expansion of the Internet and the 'us' reaching out into it as the intrepid explorers we are, are tangled in a trove of media and showboating, circus tricks, fatalism, more. Its staring back at me from a screen was a nod, that hey you can trust me, but, it has a view into my life; and there isn't always the same person on the other side. Any source will entertain a solution for any thought, worry, or distraction and all its derivatives (i.e. automated software to appease your pains). I feel tethered to this web, and what I'll call real and potential communities. There is the community I know, and its virtualized impression on me through various platforms, and a larger community that is a part of an unknown network of people I could have known at some point in time, but I'm not really sure I have ever known them. Does knowing someone mean you can trust them? That depends on your definition of 'knowing'.

We have a limited vocabulary that doesn't articulate change in things and the environment very well. We use appendages of the primitive customs of our languages, and we have come to employ the most vague and the most absolute terms to describe our world, as it has become abstracted away from us by graphical information.