A quiet revolution

Boy do the months get by! I cannot believe that we have celebrated our 3rd Thanksgiving here in TV. Our table grows a little bigger each year. This year we had 18 for dinner. The generational split was interesting to me. We had 5-20 somthings, 4 over 85, and 9 of us boomers. No little ones! I don’t know exactly what this all means; I’m just making an observation. As usual we had too much food and will exist on leftovers until we cannot stand anymore. The featured drink of the day was White Russians. We missed Beth and Ron this year, but welcomed Ricky and Debbie and her family.

We adopted a cat for Burt and Carol. They miss the barn cats that he fed at the back door every morning up North. He would have a fit if he knew that Sambo cost $85. Cats were routinely dropped off at the farm, and took up the job as mouse catchers for free. He asked Bri if the cat needed to be walked twice a day. We are really surprised at how narrow his knowledge of the world is for being a resident on the planet for 90 years. Some of the things he just doesn’t seem to grasp are a result of his age, but sometimes it is due to the communication limitations that his generation has experienced.

Communication and the media are things that are viewed very differently across generations. I think that we have not yet come to grasp the seminal change, or paradigm switch, in communication that the internet has immersed us in without us noticing. I see this change as pretty exciting and scary at the same time. It still amazes me that anything that you need to know can be found on the internet if you have the will and the patience to search.

The information available on the internet in incredible and has made research, and information validation as we knew it a thing of the past. The twenty-something’s and down, know that what is reported is to be viewed with a skeptical eye. Because anyone can now publish unconfirmed information, sources can be vague or unsubstantiated, and information need not be corroborated or validated. Wikepedia is an on line encyclopedia that virtually anyone can update. The responsibility to get the truth is now up to the seeker, not the provider. That alone is monumental.

The invention of the printing press was obviously one of those moments that changed everything we knew about communication, but the invasion of the internet, and tabloid news into our homes has been a little more insidious. I am still trying to wrap my head around this, without turning into a Ted Kiminski (uni-bomber), but it scares me to realize that there are at least two generations of people out there that believe everything they read is confirmed, validated truth. The opportunity to promote propaganda and spread lies is an incredibly important outcome that has yet to be fully examined. I am watching this happen with the health care reform debate. The insurance companies are preying on the fear of seniors, and scaring them with misinformation to protect their obscene profits generated by the current system. This is only one small example.

Stay tuned as this hypothesis (manifesto?) of mine on the quiet revolution takes shape.