Quote:
Originally Posted by Dread Knot
The internet certainly has created massive shifts in society good and bad, shifts we're still struggling to figure out--it very well could be considered a collapse of the previous society, and the start of a new one.
There's a parallel in paleontology: mass extinctions. You can either kill most things off suddenly (mass die-offs), or you can rapidly replace the existing things with new things (mass turn-overs). Similarly, a societal collapse can be a destructive collapse, such as the fall of Easter Island, or a slow shift to a new society, such as after the fall of Rome.
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This is a good point and good examples made. We are now moving rapidly into the new age of communication and technology, in a manner which alarms and frightens so many. I would not be surprised to see a new Luddite movement start up in the next decade or two as a reaction to the new society we will be living in, one where privacy is something that doesn't really factor in to peoples thoughts any more, a new area of exhibitionism where anyone can be a star.
We're already part way there in some instances, take for example the likes of Pewpewdie or TotalBiscuit, people who have decided to get a camera, or microphone (or both) and play games or do things whilst recording themselves, either for entertainment or for education. They have become minor internet celebrities, in fact people like Nostalgia critic and Angry Video Game Nerd have even found their way into the entertainment industry of other nations (An anime from Japan featured the likeness of the two in a brief scene). All this from relatively little.
Once upon a time it would take an agent, years of tolling around small two-bit shows, gigs here and there, before you were able to get your big break with an audience number in quadrupal digits. Sure, there are still agents in the internet fame world, but they are mainly to assist with demand
after the success has been made.
I think a lot of people are terrified of this new era, it's so dramatically different from the era they grew up in that they no longer feel safe or secure in the society they see around them. This has happened in every change in society, I mean remember the mothers and fathers who saw Elvis as a destructive influence on their sons and daughters? So it is with all different kinds of changes in society, and when you compare the society of the 1900s with the 1960s and then the 2000s you see a rapid transformation which is aided and sped up by the growing communications network, from telegraphs, to radio, to television, to the internet.
Personally, I find it exciting, I cannot wait to see what technology awaits us in the next fifty years if we are able to get that far without our fears overcoming our rationality. Whilst our physical world may not be the utopia we may hoped it to be, I think that we may be able to make our non-physical world a more favourable place to live, and thus humanity will eventually move towards a more data based existence, in a manner perhaps not unlike that seen in the Matrix...just with less genocidal robots...possibly.