But thinking young and growing older is no sin.
So sang The Byrds in 1968′s “Goin Back”. The song, written during the height of ’60s fun and free-love, spoke towards the consequence of creating a generation “mired in permanent adolescence” – quoting The Observer Music Monthly (“1,000 Songs Everyone Must Hear”).
The 60′s generation perpetuated youthfulness through the most popular media of the day – music. I’d like to argue that today’s generation of youth have found a similar ideological Holy Grail – one which, like music 40 years ago, was the ultimate tool for socializing, expression and communication.
Today’s younger generations have been raised with a new tool – the internet. The internet prolongs our adolescence is a similar way to music, and with far more widespreading effects.
As my pal Dan over at Ultrakillbot remarks, it was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that highlighted the anxiety that the world is becoming full of mindless pleasures, pushing us into general apathy through a constant access to leisure. From Facebook quizzes to web games, and everything in-between, these pleasures serve no utility other than to waste our time.
But the internet doesn’t just provide us with near-infinite leisure-time – it’s also a gigantic hub of information. In a similar way that many people in the ’60s were informed of the world around them through music, we’re exposed to masses of information through the world wide web.
As Neil Postman says in the forward to his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, comparing Orwell’s totalitarian future to Huxley’s pacified vision,
“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
With the end results, it isn’t just that our adolescence is prolonged – our entire mental development is caught in a slow-motion cycle. Such retardation can only mean the end of days.
In a Nostradamus-esque prediction of how the future will pan out, I’ve put together a list of quite possible scenarios that will result from our lack of development. So, thinking young and growing old is no sin, eh Goffin? Think again.
A Depraved New World - synopsis
We favour dialogue over action. Wars and terrorism come to an end. Israel and Palestine finally pull it together over a cup of tea. Unfortunately, the countries that never had internet still favour war, and take over the world.
Development of our social skills is delayed. So used to talking in internet chat rooms, commenting on blogs and twittering, it takes us into we’re well passed age 30 to hold a decent conversation with another human being.
The vast amount of information available to us dilutes our capacity for maintaining common sense. Special “common sense” study classes are held in city halls.
Aforementioned lack of common sense combines with vast amount of information, resulting in mass dilly-dallying over chosen career paths. Then everybody ends up with the wrong job. You thought you were an expert at ornithology because of that Wikipedia entry. Now the birds are all dead. Those of us who continue to dilly-dally continue their higher education and become dependent on their parents to survive.
We reject any form of goods that aren’t a product of “freeconomics”. As a result, the world economy totally collapses. We become caught in a ridiculous catch-22, where we can’t consume the products that aren’t being advertised to us because we aren’t consuming them. Childlike, we depend on our parents to buy us things.
Comedian news pundits and gossip blogs rule our attention. The major dailies crash and burn. John Stewart and Perez Hilton become King and Queen of the new information world.
Mass spontaneous implosions occur due to overwhelming access to distractions. Phil, a student in Kentucky, becomes the first victim in 2015 after being caught in an endless cycle between making an iPod playlist, texting friends and surfing blogs. Luckily, implosions aren’t too messy, so cleanup is easy.
3 Comments
I read a paper once that argued that maintaining the youthful learning state of your mind was a evolutionary goal, since never stopping learning prolongs your usefulness. Too lazy to find it again.
One thing that predictions like this leaves out is the bell curve of intelligence that’s always present in the population. When you get right down to it, the vast majority of the people on this planet are idiots. These are also the ones who pick the leaders, because majority rules. But the burden of innovation is carried by the top percentage of people who are capable of looking around them and seeing where improvements are needed, without just turning a blind eye, calling it someone else’s problem and continuing to spill out their utterly vacuous thoughts along with all the other twits on twitter.
You’re worried that everyone will forget how to think, but really a lot of people never had that capacity and never will. Those of us who can think for ourselves have the choice to give that up. If all of us choose to do that, then our race deserves whatever it gets.
Here you have a group of people so stupid that most of them can’t stop eating. They elect your leader every term, and that leader feeds you whatever bullshit they can to keep themselves in power. You don’t have to look to the future for societal disaster.
I do agree that, when it comes down to it, it is up to people’s own autonomy to decide how to live their lives. A lot of people lack the initiative and self-awareness to use that autonomy.
I think there’s a strong theory to suggest that the future holds even more opportunities for people to lose control of self-awareness and autonomy. Every day it seems there are more and more avenues to push us into passivity – avenues that haven’t existed before.
To use a basic example, 50 years ago, if you wanted to find information, you would have to leave your house, go out into the big world and actual do research by yourself – in library, for example, or by talking to people. Now, it’s all to easy to access whatever information we think we want. In the process of finding that information so easily, there’s a good chance we’ll miss out on any tertiary discoveries that would have been presented to us otherwise. With such passive access to a limited amount of information, we get dumber and dumber as a result.
There’s a very cyclical problem here. As we continue to passively access information, our sense of autonomy decreases. So we access even more information passively. So yes, the stupidity continues, but it also increases over time.
The flip side of that is something that used to happen to me on everything2, which used to drag me through entire night shifts. I’d start with one or more pages on e2, then at the bottom there are a bunch of semi-related links with interesting titles which I then have to read as well. You don’t see the end of the browser’s tab bar for some hours after this.
I haven’t read e2 in a long time, but something very similar happens to me now on Wikipedia. If you go to the library you couldn’t very easily start with “Peptides” and a few hours later find yourself at “Simultanagnosia”.
And you won’t have to overhear some idiot try to pick up some other idiot while she’s trying to explain what happened on Top Model last night.