Reclusland

In truth, the exclamation point is an antidote not to the intrinsic dullness of the medium (as Shipley and Schwalbe suggest) but to the vapid back-and-forths the medium facilitates. For centuries, the act of writing mandated a tremendous exertion of labor, so that scribes committed to the page only texts of supreme import. (Imagine a team of tonsured monks toiling for decades on an illuminated manuscript that read, “WTF … c u l8r?”) For centuries, that which was written had to deserve to be written. Today’s technology, however, allows us to transmit doodles of thought (e.g. “Running 10 mins late”) we never would have deemed worthy of print. It’s not that we know we aren’t writing well—and so tack on some exclamations!!!—it’s that we know what we’re saying doesn’t deserve to be written at all.
From http://www.slate.com/id/2173076/pagenum/2

Toiling for years over a book, only committing to writing that which is extremely important…  This implies the growth of information (as text) as being a slow thing.  Now, with the extreme growth of the amount of things we have recorded, due to our increase ability to record, we find that knowledge, information, is no longer necessarily a measurement of intelligence.  As Einstein says (to paraphrase), imagination is the true measure of intelligence, not knowledge.  Due to the gross of information easily available to us, it will become increasingly important to know how to find information, rather than knowing that information yourself.  This will force us to pay more attention to the current situation, to the reality around us, rather than reaching back to the past (learned knowledge) to find an answer.  This, I believe, this will bring about a social change where the ability to learn is considered more important than what has been learned in the past.  Being a jack-of-all-trades will be more important than being a master of any, as masters knowledge quickly becomes outdated, whereas the jack-of-all-trades is quickly able to adjust to changing information.

Again, this ties into my theories on punctuated evolution…

—————(a little later):

And to follow up on this…

How alive? Too alive!  – Aesop Rock

Life is speeding up.  We are becoming too alive to fit inside old social paradigms.  As we grow more and more comfortable with our new aliveness, we can only hope that the social paradigms speed up as well.  Eventually we will be able to allow ourselves to be comfortable with being as alive as we can be.

Perhaps our mass paranoia and anxiety is leading up to this, a end to our self-stifflement, and acceptance of what we are truly capable of as human beings.  If this is true I can only become more and more excited by the possibilities.