Not so sexy, but interesting. What do you think?

richard · 21-10-12 01:05:05

It's not just lots of information that technology brings, it's competition. In a relatively closed community (pre-radio, say) you can establish your place, aspire, and have a reasonable chance of reaching your goals. Chances are you'll excel at something and be respected by your peers for it. You can find a mate and there are minimal distractions to the progress of your relationship.

With the internet your competition pool is now about a billion. You can't be the best at anything on the internet. Your partner can find people to talk to who understand them better than you do. They can even have some kind of sex; it's easy and discreet and tempting. Trying to determine which relationships are the most robust and worth investing yourself into is difficult.

Then of course there's the troll/bully thing. It's one thing to be bullied in the schoolyard but you know who your enemies are and they're limited in what they can get away with. And there's only a few of them. To be publicly hated by thousands of people who hide behind anonymity is probably an order of magnitude more difficult to cope with.

viva · 22-10-12 00:42:08

A relatively closed community is a double-edged sword - the advantages you mention, Richard, are certainly there and in those terms, one can lead a fulfilling life. Or at least a simple, romanticized version of peasant life. But according to your model, the human can only be truly fulfilled in a vacuum of enlightenment, with the wool pulled firmly over their eyes. Before the radio and such, it's not that other ways of life, other potential mates, other vistas and other professions did not exist - we just could not access them.

There are more evils inherent in this kind of village life. The bottom rungs of that society are more scorned for having slimmer options. Imagine being the only transexual in a closed town whose occupants have no reason to understand that others like you exist. Imagine finding your mate only to find that she is violent and abusive - with little to no outside communication, how will you find a community to support you in your desire to distance yourself from her? You're born with a big brain, big ideas - and no access to a community of the finest scientists to roast them with. You seethe under a small town's boundaries.

Then there are the physical realities of life improvement through large scale community - dental care, modern medicine, revolutionary crop production techniques, irrigation and plumbing. Not to mention the social evolution we've experienced - let me remind you that small-town villages weren't exactly the most gender qualitative places. It is an old-fashioned male fantasy you describe - good job, respected by his peers, good mate, not a lot of competition. That simple humane dream was impossible for most women in small town, closed communities. Were we happier when one daughter died of dysentery at 14 and the other was dull-eyed, pregnant, and washing dishes for her mate (who didn't really understand her) at 23?

Perhaps ignorance is bliss - but I aspire to more for myself, and clearly so does humanity as a whole.

We reach out for knowledge to burn us, to set us free, we find that freedom is less warm and ego-enriching than our spun nests once were. But we crave freedom nonetheless.

We expand and as we do, we evolve. Otherwise we'd just spin in the dirt with our mates, vaguely unsatisfied, vaguely respected but without any other options. Now we see a time of transition (and to be sure, what time is not one of transition) during which the whole wide world is splayed out before us and yeah, it's scary. It'll do your head in. For some more than others. The monogamy of choicelessness is no longer in effect - we must learn to make decisions about our life every single day, learn to let go of the people we love who desire to cast their net even wider. Commitment means a lot more when we are aware of another option.

When we are competing against EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, we may begin to recognize the futility of competition in general, and relegate it back to sports and games where it belongs. The end of the rat race.

Sometimes I am petrified by the reality that there will always be someone better than me at what I choose to do. But I am comforted by the fact that no one in the whole world will do it quite like me. The sheer potential of 26 english letters, and my personal journey with them, is humbling and beautiful. Why should that beauty be tarnished just because I share that alphabet with other writers? I lose nothing.

Let others be better than me. Who cares? True respect and value come from within - this is clear. My community, ie. my friends, my family, my housemates, and the people I meet along the way, have almost unanimously admired me in a way that gave me support even through my own self-doubt. This does not change because someone makes more money than me or produces more work than me.

I am a reader. I will never adhere to the concept that life is better without knowledge, or with limited knowledge. It may be harder, more complicated, more requiring of my constant growth and grace - and maybe I will never, with my little monkey brain, be able to grasp even a smidge of what's really up, but all the effort to do so is for me what life is really about.

Last edited by viva (22-10-12 00:51:42)

viva · 22-10-12 01:00:51

Haha reading my other large post back I find it amusing how fixated I am on teen girls dying of dysentery.

HollyWood · 22-10-12 02:34:35

I think, for me, the competition is the least of my worries. Yes there will always be people who are just as good, better and worse than you at your chosen 'niche'. But I think the actual search for and maintenance of that niche is actually the hardest part for me because that entails doing what makes you 'happy' and when 'happiness' is an unattainable fleeting moment as opposed to a constant state of mind, that goal is futile and it's the futility that feels like failure to me.

On the notion of the democracy of the internet and its anonymity, that is great news for learning (and, yes, ignorance IS bliss but you'll find unhappiness elsewhere - like your sense of lack of knowledge or inadequacy Viva, which I would feel too) but not necessarily good for bullies. For example, Anonymous' (world's largest hacker community) recent outing of the alleged internet bully who spurred on the suicide of teenager Amanda Todd has clearly turned the tables on that particular troll. I think the sense of security in anonymity we find on the internet is a false one and that everything has some regulating body whether it be covert or legitimized by law.

viva · 22-10-12 02:51:17

I don't know if there's a niche. A niche might be a fallacy when it comes to extraordinarily complicated beings with faulty perception and memories thrust into a linear timeline, tripped up by random chance and constantly tricked by shadows and bears and hormones.

Today I am a girl who sits in chairs, tomorrow I may be a mother, a radio producer, a vegetable, someone's darling, another one's idol. I experiment with modes of behaviour, growing less and less floppy - but if a core facet of my personality is being intrigued by new things and knowledge, I cannot imagine for myself a niche to spurn all other niches.

I'm too young to say for sure but based on my experiences and observations so far, I'm not sure the choosing, the adapting, the shaking off of shackles and the readjusting ever ends. Deciding who you are, what your art looks like, what you like for breakfast and where your dream house should be located - this decision seems to be no more than a cue for all desires, inclinations and circumstances to change yet again.

Someone smart and round-bellied once said that the path is the goal. Only remembering this brings joy in the futility of walking in ever expanding circles until we keel over from exhaustion, allowing our children to keep walking on for no particular reason whatsoever. It just feels good to move these legs. I'm not sure that happiness is much more interesting to me than failure - what's good is the combination of all stimuli, the ever-fruiting orchard of emotional, intellectual, and sensory potential.

artemesia · 22-10-12 10:13:39

In times like these i always refer back to Herbie Hancock

We are eternally linked not just to each other but our environment.

Simply put knowledge corresponds to the past, it is technology. Wisdom is the future, it is philosophy, it is peoples hearts that move the age, while knowledge may provide useful point of reference it cannot become a force to guide the future. By contrast wisdom captivates peoples hearts and has the power to open a new age. Wisdom is the key to understanding the age, creating the time.

blissed · 22-10-12 11:50:22

I don't think just before radio is far enough back to example a community we evolved in. World war 1 was still a huge complex meritocracy where people have to leave small communities to achieve ambition.

Much of our evolution 60,000 BC to 5000 BC Seems to involve small tribes that still contain professors, artists, herbalists, philosophers, advocators and that level of intelligence and information is needed to thrive. Try walking into the woods and stay there forever. Find your own medicine, food and shelter and protection. There's a huge amount of knowledge you need to prosper and that quest for knowledge would be ongoing. A hint on intelligence level is that there were pre missionary tribes in Africa who viewed sexuality as fluid and not having a word for homosexuality just said that persons sexual energy was for their own sex. and there's diversity with matriarchy and polygamy polyandry all largely unnamed and uncatagorised.

I think whenever a small society became stale or oppressive people who didn't like it split and moved to new land (the great and gradual on foot migration out of Africa). Imagine everyone in this thread was in a tribe and now decide to split from oppression and find unoccupied land with no laws and fashion a small society as we please. What freedom, no mortgages or rent just a life or death adventure that bonds people. Viva there is 'the path is the goal' quite literally. And going back to Orioneyes original point I think it's that bond that we're largely missing now. I think co-operation was the main survival driver then and having a place in a small team or community means your much less replaceable so feel valued. Slim competition or valued co-operation they're all just modern words that describe the same area when your boss/chief can't easily replace you

As for today I absolutely love that we can all make movies and music in a way we could at one time only dream of, with so many doing it, why worry about trying to impress or the competition, just put it out there with all the others in a happy long tail of self expression and if somneoine likes it that's great.

.

Last edited by blissed (22-10-12 18:39:34)

VeronicaF · 23-10-12 02:26:13

richard wrote:

Humans can adapt, but only within the capacity of their physiology.
........
By way of analogy think about early PC's with processor speeds of 4Mhz. They could do so many different things from accounting to word processing and games, and their speed was fine when using software like Wordstar. A competent typist who knew all the control commands could probably format a document more quickly on Wordstar on an XT machine than most people could on Word 2010 on the latest PC. But when developers wrote complex programs like Word, the machines hit the wall and couldn't cope.
.....
If you look at how evolution works and take an intuitive view, this hypothesis is self evident. Changes to human physiology take dozens to hundreds of generations. They are driven by need and don't build-in excess capacity.

That's only if you are considering evolution to be entirely organic. I think once we got to the point of saving our weak we left that well behind. As I'm sure you can all tell from the robot leg lust, I don't believe that we will continue to evolve naturally but rather, digitally/mechanically/artificially. We don't need the level of competition to survive that we did in the past because we're not fighting to continue our genetic code.

Now we're in a time of evolving creativity. There is so much stuff out there to know and learn that we simply can't know it all. Most of us wouldn't be able to survive entirely on our own because most of those skills are lost to us. However it does mean that we specialise. Our knowledge is elaborate and varied and we all use it differently, which makes for some amazing discoveries. And now it's survival of the fittest in terms of the newest social media platform, the up and coming acne treatment or high speed, mind controlled, robotic leg apparatus. I think it's exciting....and overwhelming...and definitely beyond the individual. Maybe it's another reason why we have these issues with depression and anxiety. It isn't all about us. But we still want recognition.

Not rereading this so I hope it all makes sense.

VeronicaF · 25-10-12 03:09:36

I thought those of you who have contributed to this thread might enjoy this vid

richard · 25-10-12 03:32:55

VeronicaF wrote:

Maybe it's another reason why we have these issues with depression and anxiety. It isn't all about us. But we still want recognition.

Not rereading this so I hope it all makes sense.

Yes! I think that's part of what I was trying to say but you've said it better.

#26 21-10-12 01:05:05

Re: Not so sexy, but interesting. What do you think?

#27 22-10-12 00:42:08

Re: Not so sexy, but interesting. What do you think?

#28 22-10-12 01:00:51

Re: Not so sexy, but interesting. What do you think?

#29 22-10-12 02:34:35

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#30 22-10-12 02:51:17

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#31 22-10-12 10:13:39

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#32 22-10-12 11:50:22

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#33 23-10-12 02:26:13

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#34 25-10-12 03:09:36

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#35 25-10-12 03:32:55

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