Herewith a guest contribution from my daughter, herself a very amusing blogger (check out her Pontoon Pirates here). Today she is writing in a more serious vein:
I’ve been thinking recently about our feeling of the dilution of culture…the loss of moral values and much else. What’s actually going on is probably simply that, with the Internet, cultural currents are now mixing more and more.
Justin’s remark [in a comment on Do-It-Yourself Value Systems] about a small number imposing their values on the majority in Renaissance Europe brought back a thought I’ve had. There are vastly more people in contact with one another than in the fifteenth century. But in a book I read called the Tipping Point (which I enjoyed because it classified people in a way I agree with: connectors, mavens, and salesmen), the author describes how fashion fads expand. They do start with small groups of people and catch on like forest fires. The author of Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, actually uses the analogies of viral or epidemic spreads—but I find the image of a forest fire much more vivid—and analogous. In other words, the few influence the many. Only, today, the few can influence so MANY more!
And we feel overwhelmed, I think, by the commercial aspect of it all. Because the money-makers are on the lookout for ideas, and once something has already begun to spread—as in really spread—then they grab it and flood the world with it. And we are like villagers in southern Louisiana—and the Internet or TV are like a hurricane flooding us with the latest idea, news, catastrophe, or wonder. Let me up for air, please!
Wasn’t that the title of an Orwell novel? Coming up for air? Yes! Thank you Google! It was published on June 12th, 1939.
Here’s what Wikipedia says: “Coming Up for Air is a novel by George Orwell, published before World War II. It is the most culturally English of his novels with alarums of war mingling with images of an idyllic Thames-side Edwardian childhood. The novel is pessimistic—industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of Old England, and there are great, new external threats.”
Same old, same old?
—Michelle Darnay-Paret
Filed under: Change, Communications, Cycles Tagged: | Internet, Orwell
